Glossary

Business Intelligence (BI)

Business intelligence (BI) is the combination of business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations to make more data-driven decisions.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is the combination of business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations to make more data-driven decisions. Business intelligence supports a wide range of business decisions ranging from operational to strategic.

Why is business intelligence important?

Business intelligence lets you know what’s happening in real time, why, how to stop it or capitalize on it, and how to predict what’s going to happen next. Being able to deduce behavior from data is a strategic advantage to expand your customer base, boost employee engagement, or produce a better product.

How does business intelligence work?

Business intelligence requires investing in your technology, your data, and your analytics. After this step, use data analysis and visualization tools to answer questions and identify business opportunities. Common functions of business intelligence software are reporting, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

Business intelligence and Parse.ly

Parse.ly powers business intelligence for over 400 customers. Our content analytics platform acts as a content business intelligence suite. Parse.ly provides an end-to-end solution for data collection, analysis, and visualization with the dashboard, predictive analytics with the Content API, and data infrastructure and warehousing with the Data Pipeline.

Business intelligence examples

Examples of business intelligence include:

  • For executive teams: giving leadership a short summary without dragging them into details while visualizing cash burn, pipeline, employee engagement, and more
  • For marketing teams: Track engagement and performance of individual campaigns along with overall conversions, leads, traffic, and other metrics
  • For sales teams: Improve KPIs with sales cycle visualization, conversion and churn rates, pipeline tracking, and revenue forecasting
  • For financial and operations teams: Tracking budgets, providing insights into financial data, identifying potential problem areas, and forecasting business health