1.2 Terms

Analyzing data to improve business decision making is a big field with many terms. So, let's define some of the common terms that are often used interchangeably but have semantic differences. Business intelligence (BI) is a term with a broad meaning that generally refers to the process and technology tools used to transform raw data into meaningful and useful information that supports business decision making. More recently, the term "BI" is used to refer more specifically to the portion of the process that describes and reports on the past and existing state of the business, whereas the term business analytics,  (a.k.a. "data analytics") a subset of BI, is often used to refer to the statistical analyses performed to help predict the future. However, because so many people do not understand what EITHER of these terms mean, they are often used interchangeably. In addition, each term is often incorrectly used to refer to all data analytics, purposes, techniques, and tools rather than a single subset, thus making things even more complicated. The reason for the frequent ambiguity between these terms is because this area is changing faster than perhaps any other type of organizational technology. Recent estimates place BI projects as being 40-150 percent more profitable than any other type of IT project. As a result, the rapid growth and technology revolution in BI is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.