Business Intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing and providing access to data to help users make better business decisions.

Objective of BI system is to:

- Automatically loading data from the source systems into the Performance Management system
- Making information available quickly, which is automatically distributed to users across the organisation and in the field to make it available when and where it is needed.
- Representing information in many ways – on a dashboard, as traffic lights, in a table, on a graph, so that it is presented in the most suitable format for the intended audience.
- Allowing for unexpected results so they can be easily analysed and understood with user-friendly reporting tools, which can allow measures to be taken to avert problems from escalating.
- Giving control to users, if so desired, for their own reporting, so they have the ability to create reports when they need them reducing their dependency on others.

BI is a much broader concept rather than a technology. Having the right metrics in place, having a balanced score card in place, knowing what to measure within your organisation is part of that concept.

MIS however, traditionally focused on providing managers with structured, periodic reports and the information was primarily from accounting and transaction processing systems, but the systems did not provide interactive support to assist managers in decision making.