___________ is an approach to boundary spanning that results from using sophisticated software to search through large amounts of internal and external data to spot patterns, trends, and relationships that might be significant.

Most of the enterprises and organizations collects huge amount of data through the use of MIS. These data can be based on any aspect of the business. But the collection of such large sets of data is useless until and unless there is a business intelligence associated with it. the work of business intelligence is to use software tools for analysis of the collected data so that it could be useful for enterprise or company to look for patterns and trends in the market.

The outcome of such business intelligence is very helpful particularly to managers, executives for taking particular decisions in the greater interest of the company.

So we can say, business intelligence is an approach to boundary spanning that results from using sophisticated software to search through large amounts of internal and external data to spot patterns, trends, and relationships that might be significant.