What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions.

BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing ( OLAP ), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

Why Business Intelligence is important?
The main goal of BI is to enable organizations to understand change, to identify causal factors through analysis of data by region, currency, customer or other relevant dimensions. As the CIO of a large chemical company said recently, “If you rely on averages, it's easy to be misled, but if you slice through the data, it's possible to see exactly what's affecting costs.” .

Information Management
Information Management is focused on identifying the best way to get information to the proper channels. In many instances, this involves looking at three keys areas; analytics, sharing and storage.

Analytics focuses on deciding who should get what type of information to make better decisions that will impact the company's performance. Sharing determines how to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of a solution and storage is needed to decide what to do with the information once it's received.

Many businesses are looking for Business Intelligence and Performance Management (BI/PM) which goes beyond traditional management reporting.