In this excerpt from the wonderful book of Douglas Adams "Mostly Harmless", simply substituting 'I Ching' to 'Astrology' and 'coins and signs' to 'stars and planets', you'll get a very good description of what I Ching is.
"In I Ching the rules happen to be about coins and signs, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of the problem begin to emerge. The more the rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, I Ching's nothing to do with coins and signs. It's just to do with people thinking about people".
In other words, the I Ching is a mean of divination intended to gain insight into a question or a situation.
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