Business intelligence and busines strategy

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The term business intelligence refers to the systems and processes that help to simplify and use information in an organization to enable faster and easier decision making by providing key information to the decision makers in a timely and efficient manner. Often, business intelligence is confused with the tools that simplify the process. It is necessary to understand that business intelligence goes beyond these tools, which are only the technology that streamline the process of business intelligence. In recent times, the concept of business intelligence has gained huge significance in every organization.

The main thesis in answering this posting is this: the success of Business Intelligence (BI) does not and cannot be measured and quantified by looking at the BI itself. It has to be tested and applied in the business environment to gauge whether it is successful or not. BI is an input to achieving competitive advantage. The applicability or success of BI is tested whether it will result to a competitive advantage.

Originally, the application 'was dedicated to gathering information on any competitors of a firm, and the term 'competitive intelligence (CI)' came to life. If we define broadly CI to include information gathering to include all environmental elements, the appropriate term is 'business intelligence' (BI).

There are steps the I would be suggesting for the organization/any organization. This steps are inputs to another steps to achieving business success.

To achieve business intelligence, IT experts McLeod and Schell (2010) suggested these tasks:

1. Data Collection - The firm may acquire either primary data or secondary data. Primary data is gathered by the firm. For instance, the firm's marketing researchers conduct customer surveys. Secondary data is gathered by someone else and made available to the firm. Much secondary data is available in the form of commercial databases that are ...