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"In any product company, accurate product information is a foundation for all major business initiatives, and this requires a robust, comprehensive and flexible product MDM solution,” said Jon Chorley, vice president, supply chain management product strategy, Oracle. "We believe Oracle's position in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions highlights our ability to provide best-in-class functionality across the industry’s most complete MDM portfolio. By using Oracle MDM solutions, companies can obtain a high-quality, common enterprise product record and are better able to support their key business initiatives.”

The CDO must also deal with this new opportunity to exploit the much larger range of customer information that exists outside the enterprise. The challenge is to link customer information outside the enterprise with the information that’s inside, and do it in such a way that your data doesn’t leak. You want to run your analytics externally—on Facebook’s platform, for example, because it’s impossible to bring all of Facebook’s customer behavior information into your internal systems. So you never want to pass anything out, but you don’t want to bring everything in. It becomes a game of sophisticated integration.

The potential benefits of business intelligence programs include accelerating and improving decision making; optimizing internal business processes; increasing operational efficiency; driving new revenues; and gaining competitive advantages over business rivals. BI systems can also help companies identify market trends and spot business problems that need to be addressed.

BI data can include historical information, as well as new data gathered from source systems as it is generated, enabling BI analysis to support both strategic and tactical decision-making processes.

BI programs can also incorporate forms of advanced analytics, such as data mining, predictive analytics, text mining, statistical analysis and big data analytics.

In many cases though, advanced analytics projects are conducted and managed by separate teams of data scientists, statisticians, predictive modelers and other skilled analytics professionals, while BI teams oversee more straightforward querying and analysis of business data.

Business intelligence data typically is stored in a data warehouse or smaller data marts that hold subsets of a company's information. In addition, Hadoop systems are increasingly being used within BI architectures as repositories or landing pads for BI and analytics data, especially for unstructured data, log files, sensor data and other types of big data. Before it's used in BI applications, raw data from different source systems must be integrated, consolidated and cleansed using data integration and data quality tools to ensure that users are analyzing accurate and consistent information.

In addition to BI managers, business intelligence teams generally include a mix of BI architects, BI developers, business analysts and data management professionals; business users often are also included to represent the business side and make sure its needs are met in the BI development process.

To help with that, a growing number of organizations are replacing traditional waterfall development with Agile BI and data warehousing approaches that use Agile software development techniques to break up BI projects into small chunks and deliver new functionality to end users on an incremental and iterative basis.

consultant Howard Dresner is credited with first proposing it in 1989 as an umbrella category for applying data analysis techniques to support business decision-making processes.

Business intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with business analytics; in other cases, business analytics is used either more narrowly to refer to advanced data analytics or more broadly to include both BI and advanced analytics.