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The computer based techniques that are used to dig out, spot as well as analyze any data related to business, is referred to as Business Intelligence, abbreviated as BI. These business data include the sales revenues by products and departments or by their related incomes and costs. The target of business intelligence is to help you in decision making. Although this may be used sometimes as the other name of competitive intelligence, the range of business intelligence is much more comprehensive. Rather, competitive intelligence may be held as a subpart of business intelligence. Many different processes, applications and technologies are used by business intelligence. There are, however, certain important business intelligence functions. These may be listed as data mining, benchmarking, business performance management, online analytical processing, and analytics of various types and so on.

Data mining combines different statistical methods, database management techniques as well as artificial intelligence in order to extract patterns from huge sets of data. Data mining gives great advantage of information and is considered very important for transforming data to business intelligence. It finds application in fraud detection, marketing, surveillance as well as scientific discovery.

Through benchmarking, you can compare and contrast the performance of your business as well as your business process with the best ones in the industry. You may also compare the best practices of the other different industries.

Business performance management deals with a particular set of analytic processes and management techniques to enable you to manage the performance of your organization, so that you can easily reach the goal you have set from before hand.

Through online analytical processing, abbreviated as OLAP you can readily answer any type of multidimensional analytical queries. Data mining as discussed above can be called a subpart that falls under online analytical processing as also relational reporting and business reporting. Online analytical processing can be applied in various fields. These include marketing and sales, where finds application in business reporting. It is also applied in forecasting and budgeting, management reporting, business process management, financial reporting and has up coming applications for agriculture as well.

Analytics is a very important part of business intelligence and it is a very broad category as well. It applies computer technology, statistics as well as operations research, in order to find a solution to industrial as well as business problems. Analytics includes Predictive analytics as well, which is also a function of business intelligence. It includes within, a huge variety of statistical techniques, gaming theories as well as data mining techniques. It predicts future events, by analyzing different historical and current facts.