BI at 50 Turns Back to the Future

Knowledge, Not Numbers

Ironically, the BI implementation Luhn described far more closely resembles the reference-library setting of the 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie comedy "Desk Set" than it does any system operating today. Luhn wrote of an information requestor who "telephones the librarian and states the information wanted. The librarian will then interpret the inquiry and will solicit sufficient background information... This query document is transmitted to the auto-encoding device in machine-readable form. An information pattern is then derived," and so on.

Luhn wrote about statistical analysis of text and about what we'd nowadays call "term normalization" and "metadata." Luhn did not envisage computer networks and Web browsers and dashboard displays, but he certainly did capture information retrieval, extraction, and dissemination processes, as well as knowledge management considerations, in something resembling their current-day form.

Luhn focused exclusively on documents as an information source. As I have noted elsewhere, business operations weren't computerized in 1958, so in a sense, for 45-plus years, business intelligence detoured around the estimated 80 percent of enterprise information locked inaccessibly in textual form. The reason is clear. "The bulk of information value is perceived as coming from data in relational tables," states Prabhakar Raghavan of Yahoo Research. "The reason is that data that is structured is easy to mine and analyze."

So BI thrived crunching fielded, numerical, RDBMS-managed data, structured for analyses via star schemas and the like. And BI delivered findings via tables, charts and dashboards that focus more on numbers than on knowledge.

Reporting, OLAP, spreadsheets, and visualization are central to BI, but in the last few years, BI has headed back to the future foreseen by Luhn in 1958. Text technologies have matured to the point where software can (finally) support business intelligence — information extraction and analysis and visualization — on document sources. The heretofore-empty promises of knowledge-management gurus are being realized via semantic technologies including ontologies, and the definitional objective of Luhn's BI system, to "guide action toward a desired goal," is at the center of the old-new field of enterprise decision management.

Numbers-focused BI dates to the '70s, while text- and knowledge-focused BI is of much more recent vintage. These elements — some foreseeable fifty years ago and some not — represent technology that implements Hans Peter Luhn's business intelligence system. That 1958 conceptualization of BI, with its focus on information extraction, knowledge management, communications, and collaboration, still works today.