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Business Intelligence and Dashboards: Overview, Technologies, and Evolution

• Business intelligence (BI) is a decision support system that helps make business decisions using various resources and techniques for data gathering, transforming, storing, and analyzing.
• BI technologies include data warehousing, OLAP, data mining, analytical and statistical tools, querying and reporting tools, data visualization, dashboards, scorecards, etc.
• BI technologies enable tasks relevant to data and information, including collection, integration, analysis, interpretation, and presentation.
• Business intelligence is viewed differently by business and IT, with IT seeing it as a tool and business seeing it as information.
• There is no single universally used definition of business intelligence, but it encompasses concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems.
• BI tools are software applications used to retrieve, analyze, and present data, traditionally working on stored data, and categorized as reporting and querying, OLAP, advanced visualization, advanced analytics, data warehousing, data mining, business performance management, and spreadsheets.
• Performance management and BI are two disciplines that need each other, and dashboards and scorecards represent their convergence, offering a combination where the value is greater than the sum of the individual components.
• Decision support systems date back to the 1960s and Executive Information Systems (EIS) systems in the 1980s, which had limitations leading to the development of modern business dashboards.
• User needs and requirements have changed dramatically, but the basic requirement of analyzing performance has not changed over time.
• Major technological innovations in the 1990s encompassed both hardware and software, enabling dashboards to leverage enabling technologies such as data warehousing and tools supporting reporting and analytics.
• Dashboards became an effective tool for managing enterprise metrics, consolidating and integrating information from disparate sources and presenting it to users.
• The automobile dashboard is a monitoring tool that displays the current state information at a glance, similar to how business dashboards provide real-time, multi-dimensional analysis, flexibility, ability to make changes on the fly, easy online access, and drilldown capabilities.