2. How do business intelligence and business analytics support decision making? Business intelligence and analytics promise to deliver correct, nearly real-time information to decision makers, and the analytic tools help them quickly understand the information and take action. A business intelligence environment consists of data from the business environment, the BI infrastructure, a BA toolset, managerial users and methods, a BI delivery platform (MIS, DSS, or ESS), and the user interface. There are six analytic functionalities that BI systems deliver to achieve these ends: pre-defined production reports, parameterized reports, dashboards and scorecards, and hoc queries and searches, the ability to drill down to detailed views of data, and the ability to model scenarios and create forecasts.