Business Intelligence Applications

Paul Villela

CSCI 4304:Database Systems
Dr. Carolyn W. Green
2 December 2014
Business Intelligence Applications On the May 4th, 2014 episode of Mad Men (appropriately entitled “The Monolith”, a clever nod to the iconic black monolith which provides the impetus for the evolutionary leap from beast to man in Arthur C Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey”) Sterling Cooper & Partners, the fictional ad agency around which the show revolves, purchases and installs a brand new IBM 360 computer. While the vast majority of the office greets the massive, expensive machine with much apprehension (“What man lay on his back counting stars and thought about a number?” asks Don Draper, head of the Creative Department (played by John Hamm)) (Stevenson, 2014), Senior Partner and visionary Jim Cutler (played by Harry Hamlin) understands the power and potential of just such a machine, particularly in the field of advertising. Sterling Cooper & Partners gain an edge that their competition would not have for several more years, as well as a service they can offer their customers, one many of whom would not provide for themselves for even longer. What Jim Cutler was envisioning was a strategic idea currently referred to as Business Intelligence.
A Brief History of Business Intelligence The concept of Business Intelligence (BI) began as a direct descendent of an information system called the Decision Support System (DSS), a system used for complex decision making and problem solving (Khan & Quadri, 2014). During the post war industrial and technological boom of the late 40’s and 50’s, new ideas and techniques for organizing the vast amounts of business information being amassed were being developed at an incredible rate (Chaudhuri, Dayal, Narasayya, 2011). The phrase “Business Intelligence” was first coined by IBM research