Business Intelligence (BI) transforms raw operational data into actionable insights, enabling leaders, analysts, and frontline teams to make faster and more informed decisions. In industry terms, BI encompasses the applications, infrastructure, and practices that enable access to and analysis of information to enhance decision-making and performance. What BI actually includes Modern BI covers three broad capability areas: analysis (OLAP, ad-hoc queries), information delivery (reports, dashboards), and platform integration (metadata management, developer tooling). These categories are the foundation of most BI platforms you’ll evaluate. BI sits on top of your data estate. Operational systems (OLTP) handle real-time transactions, while analytics systems (OLAP) aggregate and analyze historical data to identify trends, segment data, and make forecasts- two very different jobs that complement each other.

Key components of a BI stack:

Data sources and pipelines: Extract data from apps and databases, transform it, and load it into analytical stores.

Warehouses and lakes: Centralize curated tables (warehouse) and raw, multi-format data (lake) to support both governed BI and advanced analytics.

Semantic layer and dashboards: Define business metrics once, then expose them consistently across dashboards and self-service tools.

Learn more: Read case study and the loan analytics story.