Business Intelligence is a very broad term. The most generally is the process of transforming data into information and information into knowledge that can be used to make the company more competitive. There are many tools on the market with very different capabilities. The BI functions can be divided into four main layers with an ever-increasing aggregation and ever-narrowing set of metrics.
The reporting layer represents a focus on providing both static and interactive reports to the users across the enterprise. It might present structured data from many sources like ERP, CRM, HRM, manufacturing control, geolocation systems or the unstructured data from Web, social media and others.
The discovery layer represents the activities of skilled analysts who want to query and explore data, and create visualizations on an ad-hoc basis.
The dashboard layer is concerned with providing an easy way to visually track the key operational and strategic data like KPIs and scorecards.
The predictive layer represents the highly specialized domain of using large data sets to understand what may happen next, so that organizations can build reliable forecasts.
Some business intelligence tools focus on one layer, whereas others encompass several or all. Therefore the key to the success is the right implementation process.