Business intelligence

Business intelligence

Business intelligence mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes....

 tools are a type of application software

Application software

Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...

 designed to retrieve, analyze and report data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored, often, though not necessarily, in a data warehouse

Data warehouse

In computing, a data warehouse is a database used for reporting and analysis. The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems. The data may pass through an operational data store for additional operations before it is used in the DW for reporting.A data warehouse...

 or data mart

Data mart

A data mart is the access layer of the data warehouse environment that is used to get data out to the users. The data mart is a subset of the data warehouse which is usually oriented to a specific business line or team.- Terminology :...

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The key general categories of business intelligence tools are:

• Spreadsheets
• Reporting and querying software: tools that extract, sort, summarize, and present selected data
• OLAP: Online analytical processing
• Digital Dashboards
• Data mining
  Data mining
  Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
  
  
• Decision engineering
  Decision engineering
  Decision Engineering is a framework that unifies a number of best practices for organizational decision making. It is based on the recognition that, in many organizations, decision making could be improved if a more structured approach were used...
  
  
• Process mining
  Process mining
  Process mining is a process management technique that allows for the analysis of business processes based on event logs. The basic idea is to extract knowledge from event logs recorded by an information system...
  
  
• Business performance management
  Business performance management
  Business performance management is a set of management and analytic processes that enable the management of an organization's performance to achieve one or more pre-selected goals...
  
  
• Local information systems
  Local information systems
  The term Local Information System has emerged over the last 5 years, primarily in the UK public sector. To date it is not widely used elsewhere although other terms like ' apply to solutions, primarily in North America, that have a great deal of overlap. Another widely used and largely synonymous...
  
  

Except for spreadsheets, these tools are sold as standalone tools, suites of tools, components of ERP

Enterprise resource planning

Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...

 systems, or as components of software targeted to a specific industry.