History of Business Intelligence
Let`s explain what is the business intelligence now and what was it in the past. I would say that throughout the years that particular system used by people who worked and still working in companies was improved until now and at the moment we got quit good support to mange the companies. In the past it was a very simple tool which allowed to have better circulation of information. Now we have more complicated tools insight business intelligence what allows to run a company and managers rely on that I would say 90%.
The beginnings and subsequent evolution of what is now called Business Intelligence are not as young as the development of networking technologies. In fact, its origins are almost as old as the history of the human kind.
Data has always had to be collected for various purposes. In ancient civilisations information concering taxes, armies, population and many more issues, needed to be collected and stored. The very first example of written language is in fact data storage - Sumerian tablets made from stone that facilitated tracking the shipment of wheat. The Romans were also exceptionally fond of bureaucracy of any kind and record-keeping, especially after invention of better forms of paper. The challenge of storing more information in smaller space contiunes to the present day and there is even something that ancient stones and modern microchips have in common - silicon.
With the growth of computing power, came the development of information storage capability. Magnetic tapes, capable of mass storage, turned to disk drives, the technology still being used today. Programmers had to develop highly powerful and complex Database Management Systems to be able to manage continuously growing stored data. The revolution in data maintenance was relational database technology (splitting data into components and store them as separate pieces) which was the answer to dramatically increasing demands of data storage.
To manage their everyday transactions, businesses had to start taking advantage of more and more powerful computing systems which resulted in the development of POS (Point-of-sale) transactional systems. Such systems help companies with their day-to-day operations and every one of them is specifically designed for a particular business role.
But transactional systems as tools were wrong for the job of doing research as their primary purpose was to speed along the transactions. Those systems were often separated and so were the records, and it meant a lot more work for company analysts when a given set of data was needed. They were useful but not powerful enough.
Business Intelligence histrory started in the late 1980s as the potential value of the data began to be recognized. Business Intelligence comprises a wide array of technologies, practises and protocols required to produce business insights of a good value. The actual meaning of Business Intelligence may be different for different comapnies, depending on their current sitations, technologies or requirements.
There is no universal definition of Business Intelligence but it has to meet four basic requirements - to produce timely, high-value, accurate and actionable insights, regardless of the means to produce them.
Business Intelligence is constantly increasing its importance to large comapnies, as computing and software are more powerful and useful. BI will certainly grow and evolve as an answer to direction of the advancing technology and perhaps will soon expand outside the IT department. Although Business Intelligence historically has been connected with technologies of data warehousing, in the future it will be capable of finding and extracting data from source systems and then transform it into whatever will be needed for analysis.