In the last 15 years, some of us have witnessed mail becoming e-mail, grocery stores
becoming www.store, and step-by-step technology becoming part of our daily life.
Technology development has radically changed the enterprise's way of doing
business. First, daily tasks such as sales, client, and vendor management became
computerized, and now all the resources are managed by enterprise applications.
But this type of daily task support proved not to be enough for the business
process, especially in the case of big organizations, which ended up with all
kinds of applications, according to their vast field of activities. At some point they
realized the need for some unified point of view. The choice was between replacing
some applications and providing an integration process tool. Thus, Business
Intelligence (BI) appeared in the scene. BI uses many types of data input, it doesn't
take any note (if not necessary) of department, organization, or specific activities,
and provides a unique answer for the corporate level.
Business Intelligence, in this way has become essential in most organizations. The
goal in the near future is to support more effective business processes. Initially, it
was used only for analysis and predictions based on the historical data; however,
the new tendency of BI is to be actively involved in the business process. Integration
seems to be the key to exploring the business possibilities, and providing the right
tools seems to be the necessary step for an advanced business management.
In response to fast-growing demands, software development companies have
come up with complex solutions, which can be used to plan, manage, and analyze
a company's resources.