In a tale of prescience and pioneering spirit, the roots of modern business intelligence stretch back to 1865 when Richard Millar Devens coined the term. Devens, in chronicling the astute practices of a forward-thinking banker who diligently gathered market insights ahead of his rivals, unknowingly laid the foundation for a transformative concept. Fast forward to 1958, where the dawn of technological innovation beckoned a new era in business intelligence. Hans Peter Luhn, an esteemed IBM computer scientist, embarked on a quest to harness the power of technology for gathering business intelligence. His groundbreaking research not only paved the way for the development of early analytics platforms at IBM but also ignited a revolution in the way organizations perceive and utilize data-driven insights for strategic advantage.

Amidst the ferment of the 1960s and 70s, a technological renaissance unfolded, birthing the inaugural data management systems and heralding the advent of decision support systems (DSS). These pioneering innovations emerged as a response to the escalating deluge of data inundating organizations, necessitating novel solutions for storage, organization, and analysis. In this epoch of innovation, visionaries and trailblazers laid the groundwork for the digital infrastructure that would underpin the future evolution of business intelligence.

Many historians suggest that modern BI evolved from DSS database. Back in those years, folks crafted a bunch of handy tools. Their mission? To make it easier to get hold on and sort through data. They cooked up things like OLAP, executive information systems, and data warehouses. These tools were like sidekicks for decision support systems, helping folks make sense of all that information swirling around.

As we reached the 1990s, more and more people were getting interested in using business intelligence. But the tools and technology were pretty complicated back then. They usually needed help from IT (Information Technology) experts to work properly. This often caused delays in getting reports and created a lot of work for the IT department. Even for people who didn’t need IT help, like business intelligence analysts and users, they still had to go through a lot of training to understand how to ask the right questions and analyse the data correctly.

In recent times, there’s been a big push towards making BI easier for everyone to use. This means regular folks, not just experts, can now make reports and analyse data on their own. Plus, with the rise of cloud technology, BI tools can now reach people all over the world. These days, BI solutions can handle huge amounts of data and can even process it in real-time. This means decisions can be made faster because they’re based on the latest information available.