In a Google search for business intelligence, http://whatis.techtarget.com/ attributed the term business intelligence to a September, 1996 Gartner Group report: Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and Data Mining..