Business Intelligence is a term much used recently. Wikipedia defines it, somewhat unhelpfully, as:

“the skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.”

Surprisingly the first use of the term was as long ago as 1958 and even the recent sense of "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems" goes back to 1989, so why all the fuss now?

There are essentially two forces driving the growing use of business intelligence in its many forms:

• An awareness in business generally that raw data accumulated as a side-effect of processing transactions contains a myriad of correlations, trends and other useful information and that information may be used to provide the intelligence to inform and support business decisions.  Absolutely key here is the idea that better business decisions can be taken if data are accessible and analysed quickly and effectively to yield real business insight.
• A more IT technical appreciation that transaction processing systems are exactly that, they are good at processing transactions, and not so good at analysing and reporting on the transactions they assiduously collect.  Most modern transaction processing systems use the relational model.  Duplication is avoided and all sorts of relationship and integrity controls ensure a high degree of accuracy of the processed data.  However because of these very same relationships within such On Line Transaction Processing systems pulling data out again requires considerable skill (understanding the complex relationships) and computing power (potentially large data volumes and much joining together of data separated in the relational design)

These two powerful forces have lead to the development and use of specific business intelligence tools.  From the BI tools have grown BI Applications and in the following sections we will look at Oracle’s BI Application offerings, in particular Project Analytics.  Project Analytics was released as part of Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6 in May 2009 and offers real opportunity for Project-centric businesses to get to the high value information within their Oracle Projects systems and so to be able to take better business decisions.