The transformation sequence:
DATA
⇒ INFORMATION
⇒ BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
⇒ BUSINESS DECISION
For example, you sell 10 products to customers who are different with respect to ‘age range’, ‘gender’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘education’, ‘time of day’, ‘geographic location’ or other aspects.
Your system collects this data for each customer from each sale event. This data remains dormant till the time you generate a query to pull information based on this raw data.
This is the first step when your raw data starts to connect with each other and take a shape and presented before you. So, at the information level, different data sets start to interact with each other.
The next level is when this information starts interacting with your business performance objectives. So at this level, Business Performance Indicators (BPIs) are essential to be defined so the business information can interact with them and present a ‘Business Intelligence’ regarding how your business is performing viz a viz Business Performance Indicators.