Is Big Data The New Term for Business Intelligence? | Business Analytics

The term “business intelligence” was first coined by IBM researcher Hans Luhn in 1958, and then used in its modern sense in 1989 by then-Gartner analyst Howard Dresner.

Earlier this year, Gartner joined other analyst firms such as IDC and started using “business analytics” as an umbrella term for solutions for turning data into value :

Business analytics is comprised of solutions used to build analysis models and simulations to create scenarios, understand realities and predict future states. Business analytics includes data mining, predictive analytics, applied analytics and statistics, and is delivered as an application suitable for a business user. These analytics solutions often come with prebuilt industry content that is targeted at an industry business process (for example, claims, underwriting or a specific regulatory requirement).

There’s still lots of disagreement about the differences between the terms “business intelligence” vs “business analytics” (read the comments), but it now increasingly looks like the battle of the semantics has been lost to a newcomer: “big data”.