Business intelligence ( BI ) mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics. Applications in an enterprise Business Intelligence can be applied to the following business purposes (MARCKM), in order to drive business value. Measurement – program that creates a hierarchy of Performance metrics (see also Metrics Reference Model) and Benchmarking that informs business leaders about progress towards business goals (AKA Business process management). Analytics – program that builds quantitative processes for ...