History of BI

In the beginning...

Leonardo da Vinci, the famous Italian know-it-all, toyed with the idea of an open source BI platform, but abandoned the project when he discovered that open source and Business Intelligence needed to be invented first.

Pentaho website, largest open source Business Intelligence provider

In reality, H. P. Luhn, in writing on Business Intelligence systems, wrote "The system described here employs rather advanced design techniques and the question arises as to how far away such systems may be from realization". The system needed techniques and technologies much more advanced than were available at the time. He noted:

"The availability of documents in machine-readable form is a basic requirement of the system. Typewriters with paper-tape punching attachments are already used extensively in information processing and communication operations. Their use as standard equipment in the future would provide machine-readable records of new information. The transcription of old records would pose a problem, since in most cases it would be uneconomical to perform this job by hand. The mechanization of this operation will therefore have to wait until print-reading devices have been perfected".

 - H. P. Luhn


In 1989 Howard Dresner proposed BI as an umbrella term to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems". It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.

The most rapid (but not important) developments in the history of BI focus on vendor innovation. Architecture changes very slowly and existed before the technology was available to create BI systems. The creation of the technology, and the subsequent rapid development of tools by BI vendors, requires