Business intelligence is most easily divided into three generations of technology, each defined by the accessibility, speed, size of dataset, and quality of insights the solution offers.
Traditional Business Intelligence: Traditional business intelligence is considered the oldest version of BI and the least user-friendly. Built on legacy infrastructure that required IT professionals to aggregate data and structure OLAP cubes for analysis, traditional BI delivered reports and static dashboards as its primary outputs.
Self-Service Business Intelligence: Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) solutions offer significant upgrades to the traditional model of data analytics. Most notably, they allow data analysts and other business users to create their own reports and data visualizations using the models built by IT.
Augmented Analytics: As the next generation of business intelligence, augmented analytics improves the self-serve model in several distinct ways. Using AI, it simplifies data prep by automatically sourcing data from various databases and integrated tools. And then it allows users to self-serve ad hoc reports on a conversational UI using natural language queries.