History of Business Intelligence

THE 20th AND 21st CENTURY are known as the information and technology (IT) age where everything depends on the availability of information and innovation of new technology. This is so in the case of business as technological innovations like World Wide Web and Internet has provided a broad and open platform to the business conducted in all over the world. As developing any successful business strategy requires information and adequate knowledge about market status, the innovation of new technology and concepts like BI made it easy to access and manage all kinds of information.

Earlier before the advent of information age, it was very difficult to access any information in the absence of computing methods and so all business decisions were primarily based in intuition. But in today’s modern globalize world the application of Businesses Intelligence technology becoming popular day by day in almost all kinds of businesses. As every small or large organization requires information to promote their business by forecasting the future trends, information is now the primary tool to understand the market trends and understand their own position in the market comparison to its competitors. It is a broad term associated with different modern technologies that deals with changing market trends, customer behaviour, demand and supply chain, and several other aspects of business to improve company’s performance.

Technological advancement makes it easy to obtain vast amount of data in a less time period and again computing resources make it easy to analyze data for long-term strategic decision making. However, if we look at the history of BI then can find that it is totally a recent concept developed to facilitating business decision-making. In the year 1989 Howard Dresner, a research scholar at Garter Group (an IT research and advisory firm in Connecticut) popularized the term BI with a set of methods and concepts to improve business decision making by using data resources.

Taking common BI concepts with Data warehouse technologies, well developed enterprise application tools and on line analytical processing (OLAP) assists in faster collection, analysis or data research. Hence, BI technology assists in extracting information from the available data and using them as knowledge in developing innovative business strategies. Hence, with growing competition in market is forcing small to large organizations to adopt BI to understand economic trends and have an in depth knowledge about the operation of a business.