Business Intelligence

In the previous post we asked some fundamental questions around Data, and now you probably feel like, hey I get what Data is. But asking further questions like, What’s the point of having data? What can I do with it? Let’s see how companies have been making use of business data to generate insights.

Here’s a good intro I found while discovering what business intelligence actually meant.

In 1865, Richard Millar Devens presented the phrase “Business Intelligence” (BI) in the Cyclopædia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes. More recently, in 1958, an article was written by an IBM computer scientist named Hans Peter Luhn, describing the potential of gathering Business Intelligence (BI) through the use of technology. Business intelligence, as it is understood today, uses technology to gather and analyze data, translate it into useful information, and act on it “before the competition.”

Essentially, the modern version of BI focuses on technology as a way to make decisions quickly and efficiently, based on the right information at the right time. So the idea behind the term Business Intelligence is to generate insights around the business by using technology and act on it before the competition as quickly as possible.

We’ll look more deeply into how this is done in further posts.