From Data Warehousing to Business Intelligence Solutions

Data warehousing is a less popular term these days. The more favorable descriptor business intelligence has taken its place as it connotes the actions and decisions spurred by data. What does all of it mean and where did these terms orignate? Dataversity explains in "A Short History of Data Warehousing."

We saw the usage of “business data warehouse" for the first time in the IBM Systems Journal article published in 1988, An architecture for a business information system.

It is easy to see the connection between then and now in the quoted abstract from the 1988 journal article:

'The transaction-processing environment in which companies maintain their operational databases was the original target for computerization and is now well understood. On the other hand, access to company information on a large scale by an end user for reporting and data analysis is relatively new. Within IBM, the computerization of informational systems is progressing, driven by business needs and by the availability of improved tools for accessing the company data.'

Of course the major difference between then and now lies in the deluge of data, mostly unstructured that is added to the data management and business intelligence equation. Luckily, the technologies have evolved towards agility and operation in near-real time.

Megan Feil, September 3, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext