Final answer:
Business intelligence is the term that includes applications and practices for data extraction, transformation, integration, etc., to support improved decision making. It helps in creating insightful and actionable business information to enable strategic decisions.
Step-by-step explanation:
The correct answer to the question is a. business intelligence. Business intelligence encompasses a variety of tools, applications, and practices that are used to collect, integrate, analyze, and present an organization's raw data to create insightful and actionable business information. It's aimed at supporting better business decision-making. For instance, Business Intelligence can help organizations to make strategic decisions by providing them with historical, current, and predictive views of business operations.
Options such as analytics, analytical thinking, and Hadoop are related elements. Analytics is a subset of Business Intelligence based on statistics, prediction, and optimization. Analytical thinking refers to the method used to analyze data, which is crucial within the discipline of Business Intelligence. Finally, Hadoop is a framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications, capable of processing large amounts of data as part of a Business Intelligence system.