Business Intelligence Systems in the Holistic Infrastructure Development Supporting Decision Making in Organisations

The paper aims at analysing Business Intelligence Systems (BI) in the context of opportunities for improving decision-making in a contemporary organisation. The authors – taking specifics of a decision-making process together with heterogeneity and dispersion of information sources into consideration – present Business Intelligence Systems as some holistic infrastructure of decisionmaking. It has been shown that the BI concept may contribute towards improving quality of decision-making in any organisation, better customer service and some increase in customers’ loyalty. The paper is focused on three fundamental components of the BI systems, i.e. key information technologies (including ETL tools and data warehouses), potential of key information technologies (OLAP techniques and data mining) and BI applications that support making different decisions in an organisation. A major part of the paper is devoted to discussing basic business analyses that are not only offered by the BI systems but also applied frequently in business practice.