BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS

A Study of Business Intelligence Systems

A Study of Business Intelligence Systems

Introduction

The accelerated pace of today's economy has forced all organizations to change the way they carry out their business. Therefore, many companies have invested a lot of money into the renewal of business processes and the improvement of information systems in order to gain competitive advantage over competitors or to reduce costs. They need to adjust to market and other environmental changes, which require proactive actions and faster alignment to always-faster changes on the business market, both globally and locally. Correct and in-time business decisions are crucial for companies and institutions to survive. In order to make correct business decisions, reliable, accurate and punctual information needs to be provided. One of the key areas for the past few years, where companies were investing a lot of money, was Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI) is in a high adoption and high growth area, as users quickly value the capabilities and increasingly demand more features to compete in today's economic climate. However, from a return on investment (ROI) standpoint, BI is similar to ERP and CRM, in that it has a poor risk/reward profile, as it regularly runs into cost overruns, due to scope creep and limitless requests for support from end-users (Bernard 2009). Unlike operational systems which often have specific requirements and implementation completion timelines, BI environments are constantly evolving to meet business and information requirements. Given the complexity of most system implementations, no single measure exists for Business Intelligence success. In order to effectively evaluate BI success, measures are developed to identify critical implementation factors based on the research objectives and investigation. As an organization progresses in BI maturity, the value of its activities expands. Successful organizations increasingly utilize analytical approaches to identify and enact modest improvements that increase profitability and return on business intelligence investments. In this paper we will discuss the concept of business intelligence, the current state, benefits from business intelligence and expected future of BI.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a very broad term and there exist many interpretations. The author particularly likes the definition “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.” In addition, BI often includes the process of data warehousing, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and information integration and visualization. Business Intelligence (Business Intelligence - BI) is a concept as a solution that integrates storage and processing of huge amounts of data and information to transform it into knowledge and decisions in real time through an easy operation.

BI also refers to the use of technology to collect and effectively use information to improve business operations. An ideal BI system gives employees, partners and senior executives access to key information they need to perform their tasks every day, primarily ...