If you are new to Business Intelligence software, Microsoft Power BI provides an accessible entry point. Fortunately, today’s BI software is light years ahead of the original data analysis software of the 1980s. We don’t have the “luxury” of taking a week to aggregate and present data – it needs to be done in real-time.ĭaily changes in the digital landscape require current, accurate business intelligence to inform savvy decision-making. With the ubiquitous Internet, data analysis must be at the forefront of all business decisions. It’s now almost 20 years after Windows first disrupted the PC landscape. Today’s Advanced Business Intelligence Landscape Trend analysis to inform decision making was becoming easier, but the workflows were not integrated. If you wanted to present the numbers to your stakeholders, you needed a screenshot of the chart to embed in a PowerPoint slide deck. Sharing this data was not built in, however. Additional interactive elements evolved, such as pivot tables and charts. Charts could be updated automatically when the underlying data was updated. With the addition of Microsoft Excel, charts and data soon went beyond glowing bar graphs on a black screen. Soon, old DOS workhorses like WordPerfect and Lotus Notes struggled with Microsoft’s new business suite, Office, built to work with Windows from the ground up. Windows worked on top of DOS and were business friendly. Sure, Apple had come out with the graphical Macintosh almost a decade earlier in 1984, but it was low on power and buggy. When the original Windows operating system, Windows 3.1, was released in 1992, it transformed computing. The Windows Revolution: A Leap Forward in BI Analysts might take a week or two to compile disparate data into something that made sense. At best, data might be visualized in a rudimentary two-dimensional bar graph.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the premium office software in the 1980s, but it was nothing like what we have today. The First Generation of Business Intelligence Software

Memory was at a premium, and artificial intelligence wasn’t available. With a basic black screen and a blinking green cursor, the PC interface was rudimentary. DOS was the first major operating system that launched the computing revolution in the 1980s.

Microsoft Power BI wasn’t a thing then – or even Windows. Without modern graphical software, analysts were stuck pouring through dull lists of numbers to determine why profits were down. You may be too young to remember the days of dot-matrix printouts.

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