What is business intelligence? BI enables your organization to track, understand, and manage your business in order to maximize enterprise performance. With BI, organizations are able to improve operational efficiency, build profitable customer relationships, and develop differentiated product offerings.

In enterprise networks, BI provides employees with information to make better business decisions, and can be used in environments ranging from workgroups of 20 users to enterprise deployments exceeding 20,000. In an extranet environment, BI is deployed in applications that allow organizations to deliver new services and build stronger relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers via the internet.

Because of the wide applicability of BI in both enterprise and extranet deployments, the business benefits are numerous. These benefits can be grouped into three main categories: lowering costs, increasing revenue, and improving customer satisfaction. And this list is far from exhaustive, since empowered users continue to find new ways to implement BI.

1) Lowering Costs

- Improve operational efficiency
By giving internal or external customers access to real-time data over the web, customers can track their own accounts and answer their own questions. As a result, customer satisfaction is improved while reducing support costs. A significant, added benefit to real-time data access is that data becomes much cleaner. By reviewing the data themselves, customers can spot errors, and help improve the quality of the information in the data warehouse.

- Eliminate report backlog and delays
Business intelligence allows business users to design their own queries and reports, allowing organizations to redeploy the programmers who formerly performed this task. This can generate significant cost savings in human resources, since sought-after staff can be reallocated to projects that add more value to the organization.

Do 20% of your products account for 80% of your sales? If you don't know, business intelligence can give you the answer.