Many enterprises today have a bombardment of data and information pertaining to many aspects of their business. Too often managers are looking at printout after printout of numbers trying to decipher its significance as it pertains to tomorrow’s decision and next week’s meeting.
Proper data analysis produces business intelligence. It is the way to swim through the sea of numbers in order to gain insight about your business’ productivity and the industry to which your business belongs. It is the group of applications and technologies used for gathering, storing, extracting, analyzing, and providing access to data in order to help enterprise managers make better business decisions. Business intelligent applications include the activities of decision support, data warehousing, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, data mining, and “what if” analysis.
