Since early 1990s, the business world has been witnessing a paradigm shift in the areas of the utilization of Information Technology (IT) across industries, in order to realize greater yield, profitability and shareholder value. There has been an increasing demand for cutting edge IT. These technologies include state-of-the-art software applications, which augment the efficiency to provide appropriate mix of goods and services to the end consumers. After realizing the benefits of IT, corporates are investing more in these technologies and the demand for IT workforce is on the rise. As a result, the availability of the value-added information attributes to enhance the knowledge of the business to the decision makers from top to bottom. They can use this information to formulate better strategies for effectively managing their resources and ultimately meeting the demands of the consumer in an affordable manner. This further resulted in an explosion in the growth and execution of technologies that store, salvage, manipulate, report, analyze and communicate data. In short, it is BI, a business management term that refers to a variety of software applications, that is used to analyze an organization's raw data. BI helps provide access to organizational data and information. It helps them to have complete knowledge of factors which affect their business and helps them to make better business decisions.
In
1989, Howard Dresner, a Research Fellow, Gartner Group popularized the concept
of BI to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision-making
by using fact-based support systems. In his book, The Art of War, Sun Tzu
highlighted the importance of collecting and analyzing information. He suggested
that "to succeed in war, a General should have full knowledge of their strengths
and weaknesses and also the knowledge of the enemy's strengths and weaknesses.
Lack of either might result in defeat". |
