Subject areaData and infrastructure
Also known asBI
Business intelligence (BI) is the set of methods and tools that collect the data produced by a company's different departments, connect them and show them in dashboards and reports that support decisions.
The term in its modern sense was first used by Hans Peter Luhn, an IBM researcher, in the 1958 article «A Business Intelligence System»; Howard Dresner, a Gartner analyst, spread it at the end of the 1980s.
Its value lies in cross-referencing data. The data of a single department tells half the story, while BI places side by side, for example, e-commerce sales and physical store sales, and reveals behaviours that no department sees on its own.
Source: Hans Peter Luhn, «A Business Intelligence System», IBM Journal, 1958.
An example
A European brand with an e-commerce site and stores cross-references the data of the two channels and finds that people living near a store use the online cart as a reminder and then buy in the store.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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