The Saga of Business Intelligence
The genesis of Business Intelligence had birthed when humanity established the business commerces. However, the concept of BI wasn’t well understood and even acknowledged for a long time until the first breakthrough happened in 1865. During that time, the author, Richard Miller Devens, first coined the term of Business Intelligence in his work, “Cyclopaedia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes.”
When the author described the banker, Sir Henry Fumese’s successes in his work:
Throughout Holland, Flanders, France, and Germany, he maintained a complete and perfect train of business intelligence. The news of the many battles fought was thus received first by him, and the fall of Namur added to his profits, owing to his early receipt of the news. (Richard Miller Devens, 210)
This incident showed Sir Henry Fumese has succeeded, where his competitors failed. Sir Henry Fumese developed his version of BI, then took advantage by understanding the market, the conditions, and acting upon it better before his competitors do.
Fast forward to the 1950s, and the principle of business intelligence was shined through the Allies and their efforts in World War II. The Allies worked on cracking encrypted communications from Germany at the time, by applying the principles of BI. They were collecting a vast amount of encrypted data, then examine these data for the trends to gain valuable information for advantages or game-changers.
That would lead to a famous and game-changer incident: cracking Germany’s “Enigma” cipher. It brought Allies massive intelligence advantages over Germany, and are one of the causes for ended World War II on Allies’ side.
The next breakthrough for Business Intelligence would happen in 1956, as IBM invented hard disk drives, which allows comprehensive information to be stored, yet flexible to access. The disk drives enabled business intelligence’s existence from the infancy stage into the modern age and let BI do more capabilities with a large amount of data than ever before.
In 1958, an IBM employee named Hans Peter Luhn brought the awareness of business intelligence’s potential to the business world. He published his article titled “A Business Intelligence System” and provided significant foresight, vision, and even outlining a layout of recommendations to help the companies with data effectively. Plus, he foresighted the information system would gain an ability to learn and predict based on users’ interests.
As a result of this significant event, Luhn’s work prompted the concept of data-driven decision making, and become known as “Father of Business Intelligence” in modern times.
Due to technologies’ rapidly advancement, Vendors/Clients were encouraged and prompted them to create the first database management system, which initially referred to as decision support systems (DSS). Additional to this new technology at the time, data siloes become popular, since it can contain massive data and create reports based on specific data for corporate clients. However, there are limitations and challenges with these implementations. These technologies were unmatured and very challenging to use.
Due to specific circumstances, business intelligence becomes the term popularized in humanity’s consciousness in 1989. This common usage wasn’t widespread without the contribution of Howard Dresner, Gartner analysts. He contributed the word as the umbrella term to describe the concepts and methods of improving business decisions by using fact-based support systems.
In later years, Computer technologies have become commonplace, and new data warehousing has widespread in the world. The vendors have thus drastically reducing time to access/summarize data, and gain new avenues by new tools that designed to speed the process of different queries, for examples:
- ETL — Extract, Transform, and Load
- similar to a programming language, which helps to easier to design the flow of data.
- OLAP — Online Analytical Processing
- helping to create different visualization options for data.
The 1990s would become known as the era of business intelligence 1.0
However, there would be data explosive in the new millennium, since computers weren’t exclusive anymore, as the masses would gain to PCs (personal computers) in the 1990s to early 2000s. They have access to the Internet for recreation, not just business purposes. That lead to the shift in the business intelligence world, as the demands for friendly-users software, were more increasing than before.
The 2000s (later marked as business intelligence 2.0) have marked the turning point of business intelligence, as technologies have evolving to deals with increasing complexity and speed of a large pool of data. Thankfully, there are increasing of flexible and ease-of-use programs that let simplified the reach of BI platforms as the onsets of cloud-based applications. These applications allow companies to use BI without the expenses of using enterprise solutions.
Lately, real-time processing has become a very crucial element in BI due to the factors:
- The Internet has experienced exponential growth through not just PCs, but laptops, digital devices as tablet and smartphones, and even smart applications.
- The self-service applications for non-expert users have more readily obtainable, and let them complete their projects without interference or wait for some responses from an IT department.
- The genesis of social networking tools as Facebook, Twitter, Forums, and even blogs — these tools allow users to review and share knowledge to solve the problems.
- The world has become more globalization and increasing interconnectivity in the digital age than pre-digital age does.
To take advantage of real-time decisions, Cloud technology, and Mobile for BI, have become more commonplaces and enhancing the vendors/clients’ ability to implement the decisions effectively and efficiently.
Thus, this prompted real-time decisions have become the next frontier of business intelligence.
The business intelligence platforms have undergone many incarnations, although humankind’s history, and even experiences an intense refined process. Only time telling, if business intelligence would reaching full potential in the future, as innovations are discovered continuously and applied them functionally.
Currently, business intelligence has become integrated with every industry like healthcare, government, law enforcement, professional sports, and even video games. No longer, BI was added utility or a simple advantage tool but now a requirement for any thriving civilization, not just only businesses.
Sources/Credited to:
- Heinze, Justin. “History of Business Intelligence.” BetterBuys, 26 Sept 2014, https://betterbuys.com/bi/history-of-business-intelligence/ Accessed 3 Oct 2019
- “History of Business Intelligence To Be Evolved From Then & Now.” Roosboard, https://roosboard.com/blog/history-of-business-intelligence-to-be-evolved-from-then-and-now.html Accessed 3 Oct 2019
- Lebied, Mona. “The History of Business Intelligence: From The 19th Century To The Modern Day.” Datapine, 27 Sept 2017, https://www.datapine.com/blog/history-of-business-intelligence/ Accessed 3 Oct 2019
- Limp, Paulo. “Exploring the History of Business Intelligence.” Toptal, https://www.toptal.com/project-managers/it/history-of-business-intelligence Accessed 3 Oct 2019
- Roosboard, Heiko Tröster, and John Dillon. “Can you explain the evolution of business intelligence?” Quora, https://www.quora.com/Can-you-explain-the-evolution-of-Business-Intelligence Accessed 3 Oct 2019.
- Business intelligence — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence
