Business intelligence (BI) combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations to make more data-driven decisions. In practice, you know you’ve got modern business intelligence when you have a comprehensive view of your organization’s data and use that data to drive change, eliminate inefficiencies, and quickly adapt to market or supply changes.

Data mining: Using databases, statistics and machine learning to uncover trends in large datasets.
Reporting: Sharing data analysis to stakeholders so they can draw conclusions and make decisions.
Performance metrics and benchmarking: Comparing current performance data to historical data to track performance against goals, typically using customized dashboards.
Descriptive analytics: Using preliminary data analysis to find out what happened.
Querying: Asking the data specific questions, BI pulling the answers from the datasets.
Statistical analysis: Taking the results from descriptive analytics and further exploring the data using statistics such as how this trend happened and why.
Data visualization: Turning data analysis into visual representations such as charts, graphs, and histograms to more easily consume data.
Visual analysis: Exploring data through visual storytelling to communicate insights on the fly and stay in the flow of analysis.
Data preparation: Compiling multiple data sources, identifying the dimensions and measurements, preparing it for data analysis.