What is Business Intelligence? Who Coined The Term?

Business Intelligence (B.I.) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself. It was Hans Peter (IBM researcher) who first tossed the term Business Intelligence in 1958.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).

Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.

Thomas Davenport has argued that business intelligence should be divided into querying, reporting, OLAP, an "alerts" tool, and business analytics.