1.2. BI as an Autonomous Discipline
In the 1980s, business applications became so advanced that a separate discipline of designing and creating databases for business decision support emerged. So-called data warehouses3 and specialist toolsets appeared. Although the term “business intelligence” was first used in 1958 in a paper for IBM Journal,4 a new sense was imparted to it by Howard Dresner from the Gartner company in 1988. Having analyzed the information technology (IT) market, he referred to business intelligence as to a kind of “umbrella” that covers numerous methods, technologies, and applications oriented to real business decision support in an enterprise:5
Business Intelligence is a user-oriented process of gathering, exploring, interpreting and analyzing of data, which leads to the streamlining and rationalization of the decision-making process. Those systems support managers in business decision-making in order to create economy value growth of an enterprise.
Such a definition explicitly points out that BI is an IT management system and, strictly speaking, a third-generation IT management system.6 In light of such an understanding of decision support systems, they encompass a broad spectrum of technologies, including the following:
- Online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. Software for multidimensional analysis of business data by integration, aggregation, and adequate mode of presentation and visualization of different data
- Data-mining tools. Algorithms for automatic analysis of great volumes of data using statistical and econometric methods, as well as machine learning methods that can analyze not only quantitative but also qualitative data
- Knowledge management tools. Tools that allow for storage, indexing, and analysis of textual documents and their further linkage with other data
This class of technological systems is based on the data collected by data warehouses—that is, database systems that gather data from various sources and make it readily available to businesses.
In the 1990s, BI became a widely known term among specialists, and on the level of tools, it was a standard offered not only by specialist companies but also by the greatest software manufacturers to enterprises, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP.