Business Intelligence refers to techniques and practices that help enterprises gather and analyze valuable data from multiple sources in order to make faster and better decisions. The first to refer to BI was Hans Peter Luhn back in 1958 in one of his articles in the IBM journal. Since then there have been numerous definitions by many researchers, often one overlapping the other and the concept of BI is still evolving. D.J.Power (2007) states that the origins of BI development can be found in Procter & Gamble’s efforts in 1985 to build a DSS (Decision Support System) that linked sales information and retail scanner data. However, the term was presented first by Howard Dresner in 1989 as concepts and methods to improve business decision making with the use of fact-based supporting systems (Power, 2007). Gartner, one of the world’s leading research and advisory companies defined BI in the 1990s as an analytical process that transforms internal and external data into information about market positions, goals, activities and possibilities that a company should pursue in order to stay competitive (Seufert, Schiefer, 2005). Wixom and Watson (2010) define BI as an “umbrella term that is commonly used to describe the technolo- gies, applications and processes for gathering, storing, accessing and analyzing data to help users make better decisions”. On another view, BI envelopes concepts like Data Warehouses, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), Reporting, Querying, Data Mining and Visualization all of which are considered components of a complete BI system. Initially a BI system must gather and consolidate data from many enterprise operational systems into a data warehouse and from there move on to the next levels. The ideal system would give the employees and users in general the ability to access the desired information in order to complete a task and of course easily share this information with others.
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