Business intelligence solutions transform business data into conclusive, fact-based, and actionable information and enable businesses to spot customer trends, create customer loyalty, enhance supplier relationships, reduce financial risk, and uncover new sales opportunities. The goal of business intelligence is to make sense of change-to understand and even anticipate it. It furnishes you with access to current, reliable, and easily digestible information.

It provides you the flexibility to look at and model that information from all sides, and in different dimensions. A business intelligence solution answers the question "What if ..." instead of "What happened?" In short, a business intelligence solution is the path to gaining-and maintaining-your competitive advantage.

Data visualization and data mining are two techniques often used to create and deploy successful business intelligence solutions. By applying visualizations and data mining techniques, businesses can fully exploit business data to discover previously unknown trends, behaviors, and anomalies:

 Data visualization tools and techniques assist users in creating two- and three-dimensional pictures of business data sets that can be easily interpreted to gain knowledge and insights.

 Visual data mining tools and techniques assist users in creating visualizations of data mining models that detect patterns in business data sets that help with decision making and predicting new business opportunities.

In both cases, visualization is key in assisting business and data analysts to discover new patterns and trends from their business data sets. Visualization is a proven method for communicating these discoveries to the decision makers. The payoffs and return on investment (ROI) can be substantial for businesses that employ a combination of data visualizations and visual data mining effectively. For instance, businesses can gain a greater understanding of customer motivations to help reduce fraud, anticipate resource demand, increase acquisition, and curb customer turnover (attrition).