Business intelligence is the use of an organization's disparate data to provide meaningful information and analysis to employees, customers, suppliers, and partners for more effective decision making. The core capabilities of business intelligence group information together, measure it, give end users access to it, and share information changes. These capabilities can be further broken down into three main components: enterprise performance management (EPM), information delivery and information discovery (IDD), and enterprise information management (EIM).

Business intelligence applications can be:

• Mission-critical and integral to an enterprise's operations or occasional to meet a special requirement
• Enterprise-wide or local to one division, department, or project
• Centrally initiated or driven by user demand 

Enterprise performance management (EPM)

EPM applications focus on key performance metrics and transform information into a strategic asset. Dashboards and scorecards provide visibility to users regarding organizational strategy and metrics that will improve performance. These products align actions with strategy by enabling assignment of company goals to users or groups of users. Users act more decisively via collaboration with others to share and expand knowledge, taking recommended actions, and capturing trusted best practices to optimize organizational performance

Enterprise information management (EIM)

EIM products and services help improve data quality, understand the relationship and use of information enable end-to-end data lineage for compliance purposes, and ensure consistent semantics across the business. They provide data integration methods for physical or virtual integration allowing organizations to integrate data from disparate sources and reconcile disparate data for consistency and accuracy. They ensure real-time information access and historical trending and analysis, reducing the time of BI and performance management projects to accelerate the time to decisions.