A quick sweep of the world wide web won't help you much, either. Here you'll find terms such as "directed background data", "business roadmaps", "interactive processes" and so on.

So what actually is business intelligence? Firstly, as far as we're concerned, it's mostly about a set of software products. In practical terms you'll most likely be relying on a range of tried-and-tested products (at Acestar we supply Cognos consultants and trainers, as well as the extensive Cognos business intelligence suite).

The next question is: What do these products do? The answer: They help you analyse your data in ways that help you make better business decisions than you could without using business intelligence systems.

Here are some examples:

1. How many sales of a particular product did we make in 2006, from which sales division and through which sales team? What percentage of the overall sales total did these sales account for?

2. (a bit more analytical): Which were the 20% most (or least) profitable areas we traded in 2006?

3. Who are our 20 best clients, and what were their total sales revenues for 2006. What percentage of the overall total is this?

All of the above questions can easily be answered using OLAP cubes such as Cognos Powerplay cubes, one of the key tools of business intelligence systems, or analysed using Cognos 8 Analysis Studio.

If we look at these questions we start to see that to get the answers you need, you have to know what questions to ask. Once you know what you want to 'ask' your data, business intelligence, in skilled hands, can provide the answers very quickly.

Types of Business Intelligence Systems: I said business intelligence was mostly about sofware products, but there's another side to business intelligence, which is how you organise your data. This is called data warehousing.

Unfortunately, you usually cannot simply go to your company's database and get the kind of information I have outlined above (often a lot more complex than this, of course). Why not? Primarily because - believe it or not - your company data was probably never organised to get information from it, just to put data into it.

... the information you want might be in a number of locations (different databases, spreadsheets and so on)

... it might be arranged in a way that is too slow to retrieve for your kind of querying

... it might not even exist, so your data warehousing team will have to create it for you

Cognos Tips: This site provides information about Cognos products I hope Cognos users will find helpful. However, even if you are not a Cognos user, there will be useful information to help you understand business intelligence and the business intelligence market.

In my day-to-day work as a Cognos specialist I find so often people are not sure which product is best for a particular purpose.  We also have articles here which show you how to make best use of the Cognos software range.

Whatever your Cognos or business intelligence needs, I am sure you will find something to interest you here.