The importance of business intelligence is well recognized by practicing managers and in academic literature. However, there are a lot of inconsistencies about what BI really is. I define it as providing decision makers with valuable insights by leveraging diverse sources of external and internal information. These information sources could be structured or unstructured, could reside within or outside the organization, and the information could be quantitative or qualitative. I distinguish between BI tools developed by BI vendors and BI solutions deployed within organizations.