Business intelligence, or BI, is the practice of collecting data from operational systems and presenting it so that people can understand performance and make decisions — through dashboards, reports and analysis.
The hard part is definitions, not charts
Most BI projects struggle on agreement rather than technology. If Sales counts an order when it is placed and Finance counts it when it is invoiced, two correct dashboards will disagree, and the meeting will be about whose number is right instead of what to do. Settling definitions is the work; visualisation is the easy remainder.
What makes a dashboard useful
- It answers a question somebody actually asks.
- It makes the exception visible, not just the total.
- It is current enough for the decision it supports.
- It states its definitions, so disagreement is about the business and not the metric.
Reporting and analytics
Reporting tells you what happened. Analytics asks why, and forecasting asks what happens next. Most organisations get more value from making the first reliable than from attempting the third early.
