What is Business Intelligence?

BI is a set of skills (analytical, reporting), technologies (data mining, text mining, predictive analytics), tools (Informatica), practices (OnLine Analytical Processing OLAP, Benchmarking) that help businesses acquire better understanding of its commercial (sales, promotions, revenue) context.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations.

To define it simplistically BI is a group of concepts and methods used to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems.