Business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is the combination of tools, infrastructure, and practices an organization uses to turn raw data into actionable information for decision-makers. Rather than relying on intuition or scattered spreadsheets, a company with mature BI can answer questions like which products are most profitable, where costs are trending, and how this quarter compares to plan — quickly and from a single trusted source.

A typical BI pipeline moves data through several stages. Operational systems — sales platforms, ERP modules, point-of-sale systems — generate transactional data. Extract, transform, load (ETL) processes pull that data, clean and standardize it, and store it in a data warehouse, a central repository organized for analysis rather than day-to-day processing (smaller, subject-specific slices are called data marts). Analysts and BI software then query the warehouse to produce reports, dashboards, scorecards, and visualizations that surface trends and exceptions at a glance.

BI is primarily descriptive analytics: it tells you what happened and what is happening now, forming the foundation on which diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics build. Well-designed BI supports performance management — tracking key performance indicators against targets — and gives managers self-service access to consistent numbers instead of competing versions of the truth.

The CMA Part 1 exam tests business intelligence within its technology and analytics section. Know the flow from source data through ETL into a data warehouse, the distinction between data warehouses and data marts, and how BI's descriptive outputs feed the broader data-analytics hierarchy that management accountants use for planning and control.