Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself. Business intelligence aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system.

BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence applications are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarks, text mining, and predictive analytics. Business Intelligence (BI) incorporates a wide range of information and data management techniques, beginning with data extraction, collection, cleansing, integration, aggregation, analysis and manipulation through the use of data marts, cubes, data warehouses and databases.