Business intelligence, in the context of organizations, revolves around making better decisions about your business. Unlike the example in the introduction, organizations are not generally concerned with bathrooms, but rather with what can make their business more effective, efficient, and profitable. The businesses that provided those quotes on bathroom remodeling need to answer questions such as the following:

• How can the business attract new customers?
• How can the business retain more customers?
• Who are the competitors and how do they compare?
• What is driving profitability?
• Where can expenses be diminished?

There are endless questions that businesses need to answer every day, and these businesses need data coupled with business intelligence tools and techniques in order to answer these questions and make effective operational and strategic decisions.

While business intelligence is a vast subject in and of itself, the key concepts of business intelligence can be broken down into five areas:

• Domain
• Data
• Model
• Analysis
• Visualization