The DEVELOPMENT OF SDI SERVICES

Ten years have elapsed since the publication of Luhn's conceptual paper ‘A business intelligence system’ in which he visualized the employment of e.d.p. equipment for a ‘service within an organization which concerns itself with channelling new items of information, from whatever source, to those points within an organization where the probability of usefulness in connection with current work or interests is high’. In a later paper, Luhn elaborated on the selective dissemination function. From this seminal paper, the development of SDI systems, first by IBM and then others, can be traced.