Basics of Business Intelligence and their Importance

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................2
LITERATURE REVIEW................................................................................................................4
Reference 1: Toward a Goal-Oriented, Business Intelligence Decision-Making Framework by
Alireza Pourshahid, Gregory Richards, and Daniel Amyot (2011).............................................4
Reference 2: What is Business Intelligence? By Éric Foley and Manon G. Guillemette (2010)6
Reference 3: Business justification with business intelligence by Jayanthi Ranjan (2008)........7
Reference 4: Business intelligence for strategic management in a technology-oriented
company by Maria Viitanen and Virpi Pirttimäki (2006)...........................................................9
Reference 5: Business Intelligence Systems in the Holistic Infrastructure Development
Supporting Decision-Making in Organisations by Celina M. Olszak and Ewa Ziemba (2006)10
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................12
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................13
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INTRODUCTION
This paper aims to mainly discuss how strategic business decision-making is affected by the role
played by Business Decision-making. This paper critically reviews five academic journals that
may provide academic evidence on how this role is played by Business Intelligence in terms of
criticality.
The author wishes to prove that Business Intelligence whether as a tool or process, greatly
contributes in the strategic decision-making within an organization that may drive the future of
the organization therefore, five main articles are explored to link or show the interconnection
between Business Intelligence and strategic management.
To give an insight on what Business Intelligence is, it can be considered as some form of entity,
different scholars have given it different names, it could be a tool, a process, a system, a
technology or even a product of another business that helps business not just collect and retrieve
data, but also to organize this data so that they could be analyzed and put into good use for the
business, mostly decision-making.
It is important that Business Intelligence is always aligned with the overall strategy of the
business so that most relevant decisions enabling organizations to better focus on their strategic
direction. This way, BI will indeed play a key role in making better strategic decisions based on
the tactical information gathered and retrieved.
The article explores various articles that may bring about different approaches and techniques
that may all conclude with how BI positively impacts strategic decision-making within a
business organization.
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LITERATURE REVIEW
Reference 1: Toward a Goal-Oriented, Business Intelligence Decision-Making
Framework by Alireza Pourshahid, Gregory Richards, and Daniel Amyot
(2011)
It has been observed that making decisions is a very challenging task for most of the decision
makers of a business due to many reasons like the constantly changing busines environment and
increasing demands of consumers. Furthermore, despite these existing challenges and BI in the
corporate world, BI hasn’t proved to be a very successful technique. This seems to be as a result
of businesses failing to merge or ensure the alignment of goals, Key performance Indicators
(KPIs) and decision-making mechanisms into one single conceptual framework. Additionally,
there is insufficient data available to enable decision-making (Pourshahid, Richards and Amyot,
2011, p100(1)).
Hence, the main aim of this paper is to develop one such framework that ensures that all the
decisions made are aligned with the overall goals of the organization and its KPIs. To explain the
main sections of this paper, step-by-step, first and foremost, the issues related to BI within an
organization will be addressed, then the author may theoretically explain the Goal-oriented
Learning Requirement (GRL) that is used as a model to merge all of the KPIs within an
organization to be in par with the overall strategic goals within an organization. finally, these
findings and hypothesis may be tested on an organization to fit in a practical context
(Pourshahid, Richards and Amyot, 2011, p100(2)).
According to (Pourshahid, Richards and Amyot, 2011, p101(1)), the past 30 to 40 years have
been experiencing benefits of BI which includes better and improved organizational decisions,
with better quality data and efficiently delivering solutions and decisions. Nevertheless, it has
also been proved that yet, 50% of implementation of BI within an organization haven’t always
met the expected level of success or influenced the decision-making process effectively. The
main reasons for the failure are the result of cultural resistance within an organization, irrelevant
data for irrelevant decisions, and no alignment with the overall corporate strategy within the
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