Business intelligence mainly refers to computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

-based techniques used in identifying, extracting

Data extraction

Data extraction is the act or process of retrieving data out of data sources for further data processing or data storage...

, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes.

BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics

Analytics

Analytics is the application of computer technology, operational research, and statistics to solve problems in business and industry. Analytics is carried out within an information system: while, in the past, statistics and mathematics could be studied without computers and software, analytics has...

, data mining

Data mining

Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

, process mining

Process mining

Process mining is a process management technique that allows for the analysis of business processes based on event logs. The basic idea is to extract knowledge from event logs recorded by an information system...

, complex event processing

Complex Event Processing

Complex event processing consists of processing many events happening across all the layers of an organization, identifying the most meaningful events within the event cloud, analyzing their impact, and taking subsequent action in real time....

, business performance management

Business performance management

Business performance management is a set of management and analytic processes that enable the management of an organization's performance to achieve one or more pre-selected goals...

, benchmarking

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost...

, text mining

Text mining

Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers to the process of deriving high-quality information from text. High-quality information is typically derived through the devising of patterns and trends through means such as...

 and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence aims to support better business decision-making.