The term “business intelligence” was first used in 1865 by author Richard Millar Devens, when he cited a banker who collected intelligence on the market before his competitors did. In 1958, an IBM computer scientist named Hans Peter Luhn explored the potential of using technology to gather BI. His research helped establish methods for creating some of IBM’s early analytics platforms.
In the 1960s and 70s, the first data management systems and decision support systems (DSS) began to store and organize the growing volumes of data. “Many historians suggest the modern version of BI evolved from the DSS database,” says the IT education site Dataversity. “An assortment of tools was developed during this time, to access and organize data in simpler ways. OLAP, executive information systems and data warehouses were some of the tools developed to work with DSS.”2
By the 1990s, BI grew increasingly popular, but the technology was still complex. It usually required IT support—which often led to backlogs and delayed reports. Even without IT, BI analysts and users needed extensive training to be able to successfully query and analyze their data.3
