Attivio Discusses the Past and Present of Business Intelligence

While business intelligence is a ubiquitous term these days, the prevalence was not always the case. However, contrary to general perception, business intelligence was not coined as a term for the first time in 1989 by IT analyst Howard Dresner. Attivio reminds us of the 1958 origins of the word first used by IBM technology scientist Hans-Peter Luhn in their article, “Back to the Future of Business Intelligence.”

Commentary in this article focuses on how intriguing it is that Luhn’s definition and description of BI are still apt today. However, it was previously thought that unstructured and structured data should remain in separate silos with only structured data undergoing analysis and crunching.

According to the article:

Luhn defined intelligence as ‘the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal,’ and said his business intelligence system ‘is to supply suitable information to support specific activities carried out by individuals, groups, departments, divisions, or even larger units,’ and enable ‘discovering information which has a bearing on a given situation.’

Fifty years later, business intelligence may not look fundamentally different. However, it is clear with the pace of technological evolution today that we currently need next-generation business intelligence solutions. 

Megan Feil, August 31, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.