What is Business Intelligence and how is it useful to modern business.

During challenging economic conditions and today's highly competitive and increasingly uncertain modern world, the time management and quality of an organization Business Intelligence is not only focused on profit and loss statements but also on survival and bankruptcy. Nowadays, the efficiency of business process is more important. Companies must be in a position to response quickly and must have reacting ability to new opportunities available in the market and threat that will rise in a near future. Business critical information plays a vital role to grapple with huge amount of data and this assures that your organization is running smoothly and firmly. After all, having a huge volume data in your whole organization provide access and interrogate the available information to make efficient key business decisions. there are some Business Intelligence tools which are completely designed to convert data into actionable information. These tools also help to drive new changes and strategic decisions to become more leaner and more efficient. Companies are well equipped in implementing Business Intelligence successfully in its decision-support application. Like, data warehouse, data mining and business analytical application. Business Intelligence has been defined in different ways. Jay Liebowitz (2006) define Business Intelligence as an "active, model-based, and prospective approach to discover and explain hidden, decision-relevant aspects in large amounts of business data to better inform business decision processes" (KMBI,2005). with help of this definition we can see that we derived some synergies between Knowledge Management and Artificial Intelligence/Data Mining. (Moss and Arte, 2004) define Business Intelligence as "it is neither a product nor a system". In other definitions (William and William, 2007. p 2) quoted Business Intelligence as "Business Intelligence combines products, technology and methods to organize key information that management needs to improve profit and performance. More Broadly we think of Business Intelligence as a business information and business analyses within the context of key business process that lead to decisions and actions and that result in improved business performance". So simply business intelligence is a leveraging information asset in one of the key business processes to gain successful improved business performance. After all these documented definitions we concluded that Business Intelligence is an umbrella term which is used to encompass the processes, measures, methods and systems businesses in analyzing the data, understanding the information relevant to the past, future projections and predictions and current performance of the business. In Simple words Business Intelligence is executive decision support, business analytics and decision support.

The basic goal of Business Intelligence is to help strategic Management in making informed and effective decisions to lead the business to the success. Some software's help to accomplish this simple and aggregate the data like, Business Intelligence Software and Software as a Services (SaaS) solutions. Specifically Business Intelligence are very comprehensive in terms of corporate performance management, sales analysis, compensation analysis, and spend analysis. If we talk about importance of Business Intelligence in modern world and why BI is actually required? The answer is, transaction processing system is not adequately efficient for reporting and analyzing requirements of business people. According to all the research , Business Intelligence is very vast and varied. It is like a nutshell. the key concept is delivering specific and useful information in midst of data-explosion these organization are facing currently. We can't stop ourselves by calling it as a corporate weapon to fight back against organizational fraud, abuse and waste. It also strengthens decision making in all top level management providing quick response in terms of notification of business exception, analysing companies capabilities, advance reporting, and the ability to compare data and information to sharpens tactical and strategic management. As BI is also called as a data warehouse, it is a consolidated base of information which is divided into other parties and designed in such a way that it can response back accurate information easily and quickly. In current business environment where data is everything, Business Intelligence should be very key factor to the success of every organisation. In this grooming technology era BI is basically more focused on providing right information in the right format. But on the other hand it should be delivered to the right person at the right time. As financial prospects are increasingly rapidly, we cannot differentiate and understand the implication of financial decisions but we can easily differentiate connection between different areas or business regarding efficiency within the organization and productivity. Personally BI helps to increase strategic planning for business success. It identifies those key trends and patterns in data that are very potential to open new growth opportunities, lower level processes and even helping in reducing cost. BI software provides a complete picture of whole business to every individual to share data across the business easily and gives access to potential customers and financial institutions. Historically, Business intelligence was just for top level positions only because it provides information to the decision makers. Reason behind this is that it was very easy to get an access that's why it became more important than ever. Nowadays, it became simple and very easy to use tool and can be used by any employee of the organization across the business. It helps to share information within different departments of the company. By sharing in this manner we can save our time in reporting and analyzing our information to the decision makers. Currently in every company it is essential to have regular reports like, monthly executive reports, statements and summaries which is as same as every month. in this way of sharing information there are less chances of duplication of data and

information and it also means that employees are also satisfied with their piece of work they did and their figures match up. As researcher said that Business Intelligence and Performance Management are dependent on each other, they describe Performance Management as a leveraging asset of the company to understand, align and optimize strategies and processes to improve efficiency throughout the enterprise for additional value of the company. In past mostly decision regarding performance of the company were largely implemented on single division or department of a company without any planned objective behind them. Performance Management effects on very large scale of the company using different standards and measuring techniques in every corner of the organization. Performance management takes strategic decision as well as process towards the goal of overall company efficiency in a proper synchronized way. Performance management aspect are the driving factors of BI technology. Based on researcher study, BI is the most accessiable software approach today and planning to make it more efficient in near future for accurate measuring and monitoring business activities for better performance. As we discussed before that BI was limited to individuals department, it results in a proplem to specific areas. As new problems came up, Companies also purchased new BI tools to tackle these problems. These time to time Collection of BI tools are decreasing the actual value of BI. On the other hand Performance Management is strickly dependent on precise information demanding collaborative way of producing information. Having different BI tools, the result will be diferent evertime. Thats why companies are looking BI solutions at every single level of management and throughout the entirety of the company. Which means that BI delivers both insight knowledge in terms of day-to-day operations for end users level and strategic strategic knowledge at the executive level as well. Today, companies have come to understand the importance of strong BI components in success of their business in both at tactical and executive level. A recent survey of 1400 Cio's by Gartner Group claimed that BI is currently the top most technological priority for the year 2006 as far as crucial technology is concerned. As we discussed before that the push towards standardization and consolidation is shaping the efficient market demand for BI solutions. Forrester research mentioned that the majority of the companies are using BI tools. Due to this demand in BI tools, companies are realizing that if they manage these tools effectively they will have a huge competitive edge over other companies. Current industry: