Business intelligence, or BI, is the application of data analysis techniques to business information, with a goal of extracting insights about company performance. BI tools can produce business analytics that reveal patterns in historical and current data as well as predictive modeling to peer into the future. In today’s incredibly complex business world, these insights are increasingly important for helping companies navigate everyday problem solving challenges and make informed long-term strategic management decisions.
As part of the larger field of data science, business intelligence requires data infrastructure. This may be as simple as programming in Microsoft Excel, but more sophisticated approaches to business intelligence may harness a relational database management system (RDBMS) such as MySQL as well as data analysis in Python or R. And, because conveying insights quickly and clearly is key to business intelligence, this approach often uses data visualization programs such as Tableau to create compelling graphs or useful dashboards to display key business metrics in real time.‎