Abstract: Business Intelligence (BI) is today seen as a basis for intelligent business and enterprise systems development and design. But, from the time of its birth in late eighties until nowadays business intelligence has passed a long way. The primary interest of scientists in this field was knowledge discovery and the premier professional body is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). Although the first efforts of scientists were originally oriented towards general knowledge discovery principles and methods soon it became obvious that application of these principles and methods in business environment is perhaps the most promising development perspective. The strong impetus for further research came from Howard Dresner who proposed "Business Intelligence" as an umbrella term to describe concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact- and knowledge-based support systems.
From that time Business Intelligence rapidly evolved through several stages depending on technology used. Improvements in subsequent phases do not derogate those of previous ones but rather complement them, so that BI becomes more and more complex.
At the very beginning, historical data mining methods and tools were used for strategic managerial reporting purposes. The second evolutionary stage is characterized by On-Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) technologies and dimensional analysis of data stored in data warehouses and data marts. In the third stage Balanced Scorecard methodology is used as a means of Business Intelligence creation. With the emergence and growing popularity of e-Business and other Internet applications and services Web analytics and Web mining as a form of BI began to attract the wide professional attention. The fifth development stage focuses on ad hoc queries and analyses enabled by appropriate real-time technologies applied to generate BI. The sixth stage started when usage of Business Dashboard technology became a core component of alerting and alarming systems in business decision-making supported by BI. Finally, nowadays we are witnessing the era of mobile and location-based Business Intelligence founded on appropriate mobile and location-aware technologies.
As far as it can be seen from today’s perspective, the further development in the near future can be expected in the field on unstructured content and so-called big data analysis as a form of sophisticated Business Intelligence.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Zeljko Panian is full professor of business informatics at The Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He received his master degree in 1978 and Ph. D. in 1981 at the University of Zagreb. His scientific interests are primarily focused on Enterprise Information Systems, e-Business and Business Intelligence.
He wrote 33 books and more than 180 scientific and professional papers, and lectured as a visiting professor at the People’s University of China at Beijing, Florida State University in Tellahassee (USA), University of Maribor (Slovenia) and University of Sarajevo and Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina), as well as nearly all universities in Croatia.
For several times, he delivered invited, keynote and plenary speeches at WSEAS and other international conferences and symposiums.