What is BI?
Several years ago, while I was coauthoring Business Intelligence: Making Better Decisions Faster (Microsoft Press, 2002), I was surprised by how strongly my peers disagreed about which technologies should be considered within the domain of BI and thus within the scope of the book. It was an enlightening experience to hear such divergent opinions among BI professionals about which tools they considered BI tools and which they excluded. This difference of opinion still exists within the IT industry, and many continue to debate the definition of BI. To me, BI is as much about business process as it is about technology, so I start defining BI from that perspective.
As a business process, BI is a series of activities you perform to gather and analyze data so that you can make better decisions and improve your business by sharing the results of your analysis with others. Whether you need information to decide how to make your daily routine more efficient or to support long-range planning, such as next year's budget, the steps you take to find, transfer, format and study the data are all part of BI. In addition, BI includes the processes you use to make your results available for later reference so you and others can measure the impact of the decisions you made after studying the data. Typically, BI is an iterative process. You analyze the data to see what has happened, you take action to ensure good things keep happening and bad things stop, and you then analyze the data at a later point to determine whether your actions made things better or worse and whether external factors helped or hindered your efforts.
Given this broad definition of BI, you're using BI even when you're jotting down bits of information or creating lists to help you make decisions throughout the day. Introducing technology into some or all of the business processes you use to gather, analyze and share information can make these processes more efficient. Organizations tend to start small when adopting BI technology, often using it at first to solve specific problems. Over time, the use of BI technology grows incrementally as the emphasis shifts to disseminating information efficiently across the organization. As its BI strategy continues to mature, the organization usually acquires more sophisticated tools to enable greater interaction with and exploration of data.