Business intelligence is the gathering and interpretation of all of the data available to your business from various eSolutions, this can help you make better business decisions.
Business intelligence data can come from a number of electronic/online sources. The data is commonly being produced by most eSolutions and then just needs to be captured and interpreted. Depending on what eSolutions you are using right now, such as online sales or a POS system, there is likely a lot of data you can gather to make your business better. Any online/Cloud or eSolution you are using will gather data far more effectively than you could manually. You need to access it (that is your analytics) and interpret it (that is the intelligence).
Making retail business decisions are typically motivated by the baseline desire to increase profit, market share, sell more and do it with increased efficiency. Business intelligence is a way to stop questions like “I think we might make more money on this item” or “it seems like people like the purple version of our gadget”; it gives business owners FACTS to make better decisions with.
The return on investment (ROI) for BI can be very significant and the implementation does not necessarily have to be have to be complicated or expensive.
Reporting applications are an important way to present data and easily convey the results of analysis.
“With all the modern, user-friendly BI tools, there’s absolutely no reason why excel-savvy business users can’t create 80% of their own business reports and dashboards,” said Evelson, Forrester’s principal BI analyst. “That will free up BI managers and IT professionals to focus on the more strategic aspects of deploying business intelligence systems”, he added.(Source)