BI tools can handle large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help organizations identify, develop, and otherwise create new strategic business opportunities.
Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights is assumed to potentially provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability, and help them take strategic decisions.
Devens used the term to describe how the banker Sir Henry Furnese gained profit by receiving and acting upon information about his environment, prior to his competitors: Throughout Holland, Flanders, France, and Germany, he maintained a complete and perfect train of business intelligence.
The news of the many battles fought was thus received first by him, and the fall of Namur added to his profits, owing to his early receipt of the news.The ability to collect and react accordingly based on the information retrieved, Devens says, is central to business intelligence.
"[10] According to Forrester Research, business intelligence is "a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making.
Some elements of business intelligence are:[citation needed] Forrester distinguishes this from the business-intelligence market, which is "just the top layers of the BI architectural stack, such as reporting, analytics, and dashboards.
In this definition, business analytics is the subset of BI focusing on statistics, prediction, and optimization, rather than the reporting functionality.
[15] Business operations can generate a very large amount of data in the form of e-mails, memos, notes from call-centers, news, user groups, chats, reports, web-pages, presentations, image-files, video-files, and marketing material.
[17][18] Because of the difficulty of properly searching, finding, and assessing unstructured or semi-structured data, organizations may not draw upon these vast reservoirs of information, which could influence a particular decision, task, or project.
The legislation refocused companies to look at their own data from a compliance perspective but also revealed future opportunities using personalization and external BI providers to increase market share.