I think that many folks don't remember or know about how the word "BI" [business intelligence] was born.
Back in the day corporations paid programmers and consulting companies millions of dollars for the purpose of building out applications with databases upon which to digitize their business processes. This was a great for a couple decades, up until some time in the 90's.
It was at that point that expectations had caught up with digitization and having your battle-axes in accounting/order-entry/supply-chain do their keyboard magic on green-screens just wasn't cutting it. To actually understand what was going on, managers had to ask for specific reports from these people and they were just not in a position to do the reports as well has get their own ever-increasing-shit done. Let alone whatever the hell sales was doing.
For a control-freak in management this just isn't acceptable. They started to find ways to "serve themselves". Eventually someone had the idea to hook the enterprise databases into their own zany spreadsheets. It was amazing. There was such a fountain of knowledge and insight that it made the people who could do that seem like relative geniuses. Almost "intelligent" in their business jobs. Thus, "Business Intelligence" was born.
"Business Intelligence" is the practice of making badly-designed opaque shit from brutal, inscrutable business applications... visible.
Only now are makers of enterprise applications starting to get it (or pretend to get it).
Back in the day corporations paid programmers and consulting companies millions of dollars for the purpose of building out applications with databases upon which to digitize their business processes. This was a great for a couple decades, up until some time in the 90's.
It was at that point that expectations had caught up with digitization and having your battle-axes in accounting/order-entry/supply-chain do their keyboard magic on green-screens just wasn't cutting it. To actually understand what was going on, managers had to ask for specific reports from these people and they were just not in a position to do the reports as well has get their own ever-increasing-shit done. Let alone whatever the hell sales was doing.
For a control-freak in management this just isn't acceptable. They started to find ways to "serve themselves". Eventually someone had the idea to hook the enterprise databases into their own zany spreadsheets. It was amazing. There was such a fountain of knowledge and insight that it made the people who could do that seem like relative geniuses. Almost "intelligent" in their business jobs. Thus, "Business Intelligence" was born.
"Business Intelligence" is the practice of making badly-designed opaque shit from brutal, inscrutable business applications... visible.
Only now are makers of enterprise applications starting to get it (or pretend to get it).