This article examines Business intelligence and analytics or BI&A for short. It goes into detail and provides a framework that identifies the evolution of BI&A and its key characteristics and capabilities. Also the article identifies the applications and emerging research areas of BI&A. It has emerged as an important area of study for both practitioners and researchers.

BI&A evolution key characteristics and capabilities:

• Business intelligence became a popular term in 1990s. In 2000s business analytics was introduced to represent the key analytical component in BI.

There are 3 different stages of BI&A detailed by the authors.

• BI&A 1.0: this is described as a data-centric approach. It involves incorporating data warehousing, structured data ad hoc querying which incorporated established statistical and data mining techniques.
• BI&A 2.0: changes were motivated by developments in web technologies and social media in the early 2000’s. It adapted by incorporating web and text analytics and began to incorporate unstructured data into its analysis.
• BI&A 3.0: this is a new emerging research opportunity while BI&A 2.0 is still maturing. this stage is characterised by the use of data collected from multiple devices and objects, as opposed to the 2.0 period which was focused on the emergence of the web on predominantly dedicated devices (e.g. computers and laptops). In particular they highlight devices such as tablets and smartphones.

This article is very interesting and defiantly worth a read if you wish to discover more on business intelligence and analytics, also if you wish to broaden your knowledge on big data. By understanding Business intelligence and analytics companies can structure and give use to data which will enable them to market effectively.

H., Chiang, R. H., & Storey, V. C. (2012). Business Intelligence and Analytics: From Big Data to Big Impact. MIS Quarterly, 36(4), 1165-1188.