The financial services industry is rapidly changing. Factors such as globalization, deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, competition from nonfinancial institutions, and technological innovation, have forced companies to re-think their business.
Many large companies have been using business intelligence (BI) computer software for some years to help them gain competitive advantage. With the introduction of cheaper and more generalized products to the market place BI is now in the reach of smaller and medium sized companies.
Defining business intelligence
“Business intelligence is the process of gathering high-quality and meaningful information about the subject matter being researched that will help the individual(s) analyzing the information, draws conclusions or make assumptions.”
An ideal BI system gives an organization 's employees, partners, and supplier 's easy access to the information they need to effectively do their jobs, and the ability to analyze and easily share this information with others.
BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. The aim of Business intelligence is to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).
Business intelligence and business analytics
Thomas Davenport has argued that business intelligence should be divided into querying, reporting, OLAP, an "alerts" tool, and business analytics. In this definition, business analytics is the subset of BI based on statistics, prediction, and optimization.
Business intelligence and data ware housing
Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart.