"Business Intelligence" is a catch-all term for the centralization of operational data. The term is often synonymous with "enterprise reporting" and even "big data" sometimes. Essentially, BI is the use of databases to store and link data from various areas of a business together so that you can run reports and analyse that data to make key business decisions. For example, if you're a retailer, a huge challenge is ensuring that products are stocked on your shelves in such a way that they are available whenever your customer wants them, but that you don't end up warehousing those products for so long that it starts to eat unnecessarily into your bottom line. So ideally, you would have your merchandisers tracking what they buy from manufacturers, your logistics people tracking the movement of the products from the manufacturer to your stores, and then inventory managers tracking store-level availability of products and in turn triggering the merchandisers to order more products when you run low. But humans are bad at being able to track the movement of hundreds, if not thousands, of products without the help of computer systems. And rather than having each department with their own systems that may or may not talk to each other, you would ideally want all of those systems to definitely interact and even automatically trigger some actions. As you can imagine, building a complex and integrated system like that requires a lot of work. These are all custom solutions tailored to fit your business's specific needs, processes, and strategic priorities. Companies like Accenture make bank on helping companies implement systems like this (SAP and Oracle are probably the biggest software applications in this area) because it is so complex. This is why if you own a smaller business, it can be difficult to justify the cost because your operations are not likely to be as complex as to require this kind of oversight. I don't know what mobile apps you were looking at, but most likely these are peripheral add-ons. It probably requires that you have an existing BI system running and the mobile app is just something that is compatible with your SAP or Oracle system, but that makes the job of your mobile employees like truck drivers or delivery personnel easier. As to how smaller businesses can benefit, as I mentioned, your business will need to reach a certain scale for the commercial options to make financial sense. However, it doesn't mean that you can't use the same principles behind why companies implement BI systems to advance your small business. For example, one of the biggest reasons companies implement BI systems is to cut wasteful spending. Let's say you're relying on your store clerk to notify your merchandiser that you're running low stocks of toilet paper. In a small retail chain with 3 stores, the Operations Director will likely be able to oversee and ensure that this happens. However, if you're Walmart and you have 3,000 stores, then whatever costs are associated with not having toilet paper in stock has to be multiplied by 3,000 and so you really need to create a fail-safe way to avoid these costs. I'm sure that small businesses, because of the lower complexity of their systems, can find a good way, either by using spreadsheets or small business accounting software and then doing some of their own number crunching, to ensure that they also have efficient processes that reduce costs. It's really more about managing your business strategy and operations efficiently and less about the BI systems themselves. In the end, technology is only a means to an end. More on reddit.com

The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. The purpose of Business Intelligence is to support better business decision making. Essentially, Business Intelligence systems are data-driven Decision Support Systems (DSS). Business Intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books, report and query tools and executive information systems. More on reddit.com

Business Intelligence isn't a role or position but rather is the domain of using business data to drive effective business decisions. Data Analyst is a role within the field of Business Intelligence. More on reddit.com

Being a BI analyst is all about building dashboards and creating reports. The most common responsibilities are setting requirements for data marts, addressing data quality issues, building ETL pipelines, etc. All that for only one purpose is to build useful dashboard that will help businesses people figure out how things are going. I would say that as a BI analyst you rather create tools and provide data in convenient format so that others, usually business folks, can make their decisions. Data analyst, on the opposite side, is usually responsible for suggesting data driven approaches to solving business problems. Commonly, they wrangle data to find insights, reveal hidden patterns and trends. After they find something, they present the results for, again, business folks and advise them for possible solutions/decisions. Business analyst, based on my experience, is not about working with data,or at least not as close as BI and Data analyst do, but rather about gathering requirements, building communication between business and IT, documenting everything, consulting business in regards of IT and IT in regards of business. But, to be honest, in a real world the responsibilities are messed so titles are not that important. More on reddit.com