
Business managers can explore what-if scenarios, which can help mitigate risk and inform real-time decisions. BI tools process and prepare raw data for analysis, and facilitate the generation of reports, data visualizations, and dashboards.īI and visualization tools feature customizable dashboards that ensure the most relevant information is presented first. Business intelligence concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications are currently used in a wide variety of sectors and applications, including politics, science, and advertising.īusiness intelligence platforms employ a variety of different methodologies, procedures, technologies, and architectures to enable the extraction and ingestion of large amounts of raw, disparate data into data warehouses, from which information can then be queried. And the last decade has shown the growing power of Business Intelligence and analytics tools. The new millenia would introduce social networking, big data analytics, and self service business intelligence tools like Google Analytics. The 1990s would introduce OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), a data warehousing approach to dealing with multi-dimensional analytical queries, and ETL (Extract, Transfer & Load), which is the process by which data is cleansed and prepared for OLAP. Larry Elison and his partners would release the first true relational database management system onto the market in the late 1970s, guiding in better databases and lower storage prices, and paving the way for the user-friendly business intelligence tools we use today.

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Then in the 1970s, IBM computer scientist Edgar Codd’s paper “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” would usher in the next generation of relational databases that would support the development of modern Business Intelligence software tools. In the late 1950s, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn, recognized as the Father of Business Intelligence, theorized about a Business Intelligence system that would employ what we know today as Machine Learning. Taylor would go on to act as a consultant on the Ford Model T assembly line.

Devens noted the improvement of a successful 17th century banker’s business strategies with the use of empirical data rather than gut instinct.įrederick Taylor, an American mechanical engineer and leader in the Efficiency Movement of the late 19th/early 20th century, developed the “Stopwatch Time Study” and combined it with follow engineer Frank Gilbreth’s Motion Study methods to develop greater efficiencies that boosted industrial production. The concept of business intelligence, a term coined by historian Richard Miller Devens in 1864, began with the most rudimentary tools for information visualization: pen and paper.
