A good strategy to study the ways in which organizations use business intelligence applications is to consider how the users analyze data, how they present the results of their analyses, and how managers and executives (who can also be users) implement these results.

The user community analyzes these data employing a variety of BI applications. The results of these analyses can be presented to users via other BI applications. Finally, managers and executives put the overall results to good use.

A variety of BI applications for analyzing data are available. They include multidimensional analysis (also called online analytical processing, or OLAP), data mining, and decision support systems.