Business intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable insights that inform an organisation’s business decisions.

Reporting is a central facet of business intelligence and the dashboard is perhaps the archetypical BI tool. Dashboards are hosted software applications that automatically pull together available data into charts and graphs that give a sense of the immediate state of the company.

Although business intelligence does not tell business users what to do or what will happen if they take a certain course, neither is BI solely about generating reports. Rather, BI offers a way for people to examine data to understand trends and derive insights by streamlining the effort needed to search for, merge and query the data necessary to make sound business decisions.