Business intelligence is a natural outgrowth of a series of previous systems designed to support
decision making. The emergence of the data warehouse as a repository, the advances in data
cleansing that lead to a single truth, the greater capabilities of hardware and software, and the
boom of Internet technologies that provided the prevalent user interface all combine to create a
richer business intelligence environment than was available previously. BI pulls information from
many other systems. Figure 2 depicts some of the information systems that are used by BI.