Abstract
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of transforming raw data into useful information for more effective strategic, operational insights, and decision-making purposes so that it yields real business benefits. This new emerging technique can not only improve applications in enterprise systems and industrial informatics, respectively, but also play a very important role to bridge the connection between enterprise systems and industrial informatics. This paper was intended as a short introduction to BI with the emphasis on the fundamental algorithms and recent progress. In addition, we point out the challenges and opportunities to smoothly connect industrial informatics to enterprise systems for BI research.