History of BI

Prior to the start of the Information Age in the late 20th century, businesses had to collect data from non-automated sources. Businesses then lacked the computing resources necessary to properly analyze the data, and as a result, companies often made business decisions primarily on the basis of intuition.

As businesses automated systems the amount of data increased but its collection remained difficult due to the inability of information to be moved between or within systems. Analysis of information informed for long-term decision making, but was slow and often required the use of instinct or expertise to make short-term decisions. Business intelligence was defined in an October 1958 IBM Journal article by Hans Peter Luhn.[1] Luhn wrote,

In this paper, business is a collection of activities carried on for whatever purpose, be it science, technology, commerce, industry, law, government, defense, et cetera. The communication facility serving the conduct of a business (in the broad sense) may be referred to as an intelligence system. The notion of intelligence is also defined here, in a more general sense, as "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."

In modern businesses the use of standards, automation and specialized software allows large volumes of information to be warehoused, extracted, transformed and loaded to greatly increase the speed at which data becomes available, including the use of online tools.

In 1989 Howard Dresner, later a Gartner Group analyst, popularized BI as an umbrella term to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based decision support systems