# What Business Intelligence means today

*Source: https://trginternational.com/resources/what-business-intelligence-means-today/*

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#### Going from reactive to proactive – Business Intelligence

The term business intelligence (BI) has been commonly used for the last 30 years. What is interesting however, is that with its maturity, best practices have only emerged in the  
last 5 years.

Back in the early days, BI implementations were complicated, heavy, expensive and slow. Companies spent millions of dollars and thousands of unsuccessful hours trying  
to gain access to crucial data that impacted their businesses. Without real-time access to this information, critical decisions could not be made with confidence.