While there have been several variations to the definition of Business Intelligence, they can all be summarized as follows: Business Intelligence is a robust reporting and analysis solution that provides clean and consistent information, in an easy-to-use fashion, to help end users make informed and timely business decisions. The following is a more detailed definition.

A Business Intelligence solution collects data from various applications in an organization’s operational systems, integrates the data into a logical data model of business subject areas, stores the information in a manner that is accessible and understandable to non-technical decision makers, and delivers information to decision makers across the organization through various reporting and analytical tools; including enterprise reporting solutions, online analytical processing solutions, event-driven alerts, and predictive analytical data-mining solutions. In short, Business Intelligence provides organizations the ability to organize and utilize the massive amounts of operational data that they have accumulated.