The term business intelligence (BI) dates to 1958.

1. It refers to technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information and also sometimes to the information itself. The purpose of business intelligence is to support better business decision making. D. J. Power explains in "A Brief History of Decision Support Systems,"
2. BI describes a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems. BI is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books, report and query tools and executive information systems. Business Intelligence systems are data-driven DSS.

BI 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. Applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include, notably, business performance management.