The Evolution of Business Intelligence: From Historical Data Mining to Mobile and Location-based Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) is today seen as a basis for intelligent business and enterprise systems development and design. But, from the time of its birth in late eighties until nowadays business intelligence has passed a long way. The primary interest of scientists in this field was knowledge discovery. Although the first efforts of scientists were originally oriented towards general knowledge discovery principles and methods soon it became obvious that application of these principles and methods in business environment is perhaps the most promising development perspective. The strong impetus for further research came from Howard Dresner who proposed ‘Business Intelligence’ (BI) as an umbrella term to describe concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using factand knowledge-based support systems. From that time Business Intelligence rapidly evolved through several stages depending on technology used. Improvements in subsequent phases do not derogate those of previous ones but rather complement them, so that BI becomes more and more complex and sophisticated. Key-Words: Business intelligence, data mining, OLAP, balanced scorecard, Web mining, Web analytics, dashboards, mobile business intelligence, location-based business intelligence, big data.