The term Business Intelligence was first coined by IBM researcher Hans Luhn (in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, October 1958) and then used in its modern sense in 1989 by then-Gartner analyst Howard Dresner, who defined BI as an umbrella term to describe concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact based support systems.Both these definitions were quite prescient for its time – Mr. Luhn’s concept of ‘action points’ in the organization and Mr. Dresner’s reference to ‘business decision making’ ensured that BI has direct business relevance to go along with its very interesting technology façade.
BI & Analytics, in some sense, represents the holy grail of computer based applications, i.e. the use of technology to solve real world business problems. Clearly, there are 2 distinct aspects to BI –Technology and Business and both have to work synergistically to deliver on the overall promise.
As we step into 2013, my contention is that we as BI practitioners are doing fairly well on the technology front by assimilating many of the new developments (In-memory, Appliances, Columnar storage, Big data processing etc.) into mainstream data management, reporting and analytics, while we lack the skills required to integrate all this in the broader business context. Let me substantiate that statement.
