Although the term Business Intelligence (BI) is not old at all, the scope of use of tools provided by this IS/IT area is developing very dynamically. In 1989 it was defined for the first time by Howard Dresner from the Gartner Group as a “set of concepts and methods to improve decision making by using metrics or metric-based systems.” Since then only a few years have passed but the area of BI, its tools and solutions have experienced a vast development, not only architectonic (or in other words )but also content (“what can it do ?”).
Simultaneously, with transformation of companies from those geographically oriented to product and then customer oriented enterprises it is possible to observe also changes in the primary focus of BI applications. The former reporting applications for the top management of the company (concentrating particularly on monitoring of financial indicators) were gradually joined by reporting applications for tactical and operational management, furthermore by supporting of customer-oriented processes. In time the re-active principle of reports has changed into pro-active analyses and predictions. The principal idea of decision support applications on the strategic level of management has spread very quickly and today the elements of Business Intelligence are used as an input of decision making in most business processes on all levels. BI applications cover analytic and planning functions of most areas of company management, i.e. sale, purchase, marketing, financial management, controlling, assets, human resource management, production, IS/ICT etc.