# Business intelligence

> Turning a company's data into reports and dashboards people use to decide.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Data
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/business-intelligence/
- In Spanish: [Business intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/business-intelligence/)

**Business intelligence**, or **BI**, is the set of tools and practices that turn a company's raw data into reports, charts and **dashboards** that people can read without writing code. A sales manager opens a page on Monday and sees revenue by region, this month against last, and which products are falling behind. That page is BI.

Behind the dashboard there is usually a pipeline. Data from the systems a company runs on, like sales, billing, the CRM and the website, is copied by ETL processes into a data warehouse, cleaned and organized into tables with agreed definitions. BI tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker or Amazon QuickSight connect to that warehouse, run SQL behind the scenes and draw the results as charts that update on their own.

The hard part is rarely the charts. It is agreeing on what the numbers mean: does "active customer" mean bought this month or logged in this year? Good BI teams define these **KPIs**, key performance indicators, once and reuse them everywhere, so two departments do not arrive at a meeting with different totals. BI mostly answers "what happened and where?"; predicting what will happen next is usually the job of data science.

## An analogy

Like the dashboard of a car. You do not need to understand the engine to see your speed, fuel and warning lights at a glance, but someone had to wire the sensors correctly for those gauges to tell the truth.

## Keep in mind

- Reports and dashboards that let non-technical people explore data.
- Usually built on top of a data warehouse fed by ETL.
- Shared definitions of each KPI matter more than pretty charts.
- Describes what happened; prediction is closer to data science.

## Go deeper

- [What is business intelligence? (AWS)](https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/business-intelligence/)
- [Business intelligence on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence)

## Related terms

- [Regions and Availability Zones](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/regions-and-availability-zones/): Where AWS physically lives: cities worldwide, each split into separate data centers.
- [ETL](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/etl/): Copy data out of its sources, clean it up, load it where it can be analyzed.
- [Data warehouse](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/data-warehouse/): A database built for analysis: years of history, from many sources, in one place.
- [Amazon](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/amazon/): An online store with its own delivery network, and the company that runs AWS.
- [SQL](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/sql/): The language you use to ask a database questions.
- [Data science](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/data-science/): Using statistics, code and business sense to answer questions with data.