While it doesn’t really have a universally-accepted definition, can be seen as the analysis, review, and improvement of existing business processes. This is done by mapping out the business process, identifying inefficiencies, redesigning the process & benchmarking to initial metrics.

Business Intelligence systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive “slice-and-dice” pivot-table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining.