No description available.

Implementing Business Intelligence solutions has fundamentally changed how many large organizations conduct their business. This is well understood in the scholarly literature but the adoption of BI within small or medium sized enterprises has, on the other hand, received little attention. Given the importance of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the economy, the scarcity of research in this area can be viewed as a problem. Thus, the aim of this work is to explore the BI-commitment in smaller-sized organizations and investigate how far they have proceeded in putting business analytics in action. In order to shed light on BI-implementation in the context of smaller organizations, in-depth interviews were conducted with representatives of four organizations within the Skaraborg district of Sweden. The initial objective of the research project was to explore several focal areas in order to establish the current state-of-practice. This provided the groundwork for further investigation on how SMEs approach BI. Further work involved the use of two theoretical frameworks to analyze organizational commitment and analytical maturity within the focal areas. The main findings in this work are that the organizational commitment to implement BI infrastructure is high among participating companies, but the use of analytics is nevertheless limited to few specific areas. The high ambition of managers to implement BI infrastructure can be the key to further develop the use of business analytics.  This work adds valuable insights for various stakeholders within the community and to others that want to have an idea of the current status of BI within SMEs in Sweden.

Inom utvecklingen av de flesta typer av datorsystem används datormodeller för att strukturera lagringen och användningen av data. Likaså finns det flera olika datamodelleringsmetoder att välja bland för detta ändamål. I samarbete med ett företag har en fallstudie genomförts med syfte att undersöka hur agiliteten i två av dessa metoder påverkar utvecklingen av ett Data Warehouse (DW).  De två datamodelleringsmetoder som undersökts är Data Vaulting och Hyper Agility och arbetet har fokuserat på att undersöka skillnaderna mellan dessa när det gäller mängden ETL-kod som måste skrivas, funktionaliteten i datatransformationerna, möjligheten till att uppdatera systemstrukturen samt den totala kostnaden för utvecklingen av DW-lösningen. Inom ramen för fallstudien har en litteraturstudie genomförts och kombinerats med material från sex intervjuer, där respondenterna varit konsulter såväl som företagsrepresentanter.   Resultaten av fallstudien visar att respektive metods agilitet har en stor påverkan på den kod som utvecklas. Ju högre agilitet metoden har desto mindre kod, tid och andra resurser som krävs. Dock medför även en förhöjd agilitet större komplexitet samt eventuell risk för ett misslyckat utvecklingsprojekt.

Business intelligence has fundamentally changed how many companies conduct their business. The focus of academic literature has however been on volume-operation companies that provide services to millions of customers. Complex-systems companies have fewer customers and pursue customer needs by providing more customized products and services. The knowledge in the research society is limited to volume-operation companies and there a need for more case studies regarding how companies actually use their information systems, specifically complex-systems companies. This work looks at a case of a complex-systems company with the overall aim to see how complex-systems companies may take advantage of business intelligence. A framework was used to measure BI maturity; expressed future needs were compared to future trends in BI literature and BI usage in specific areas was analyzed with the help of a framework from BI literature. The results indicate that the company is somewhere between Aspirational and Experienced with respect to BI maturity. BI is used for reporting a variety of key performance indicators and the main analysis tool for various calculations is Excel. The expressed future needs are mainly strategy-driven and technology-driven and often involve better and faster access to information. The difference in the business models of volume-operations companies and complex-systems companies could influence the BI maturity and help to explain the maturity difference between these two types of companies. Furthermore, the results indicate that there is a difference between the roles of BI tools in complex-systems companies compared to volume-operations.

It happens quite often that most Business Intelligence System (BIS) projects are never near to their completion. While there are many reasons for such high failure rate, the major unsuccessful factors of BIS result in ¡§Member¡¨, ¡§Organization¡¨, and ¡§Technique¡¨. Especially, it seems there is not yet a model and methodology gluing together the interrelationship among people, source of information, and BIS. This thesis aims to assist the enterprise by defining a model of Architecture-Oriented Analysis of Business Intelligence Systems¡¦ Requirement which helps analyze the system with ease. The model emphasizes on the structure behavior coalescence. Using this approach of structure behavior coalescence, developers would devise and adjust the BIS more flexible and adaptable. Architecture-Oriented Analysis-Model is a model which includes many viewpoints, which help analyze several problems caused by mixed BIS products. The main purpose of this research is to achieve Business Intelligence Systems¡¦Requirement through the establishment of the model, and raise the strike-rate and efficiency on the construction of any BIS.

<p>Introduction</p><p>Organizations are exposed to a rapidly changing business environment with never ending challenges. Investments in information technology (IT) have been one common approach to support organizations. Business Intelligence (BI), an off-spring from IT, is a system that assists many organizations in taking more accurate and timely decisions, improving process monitoring and providing better support for decision making. Recently organizations have started to realize the value of investing in BI, by discovering its analytical methods and capabilities to create business value.</p><p>Problem</p><p>Investments in BI have increased substantially over the past years and one reason for this might be due to vendors praise about BI’s ability to deliver business value. Significantly increased business value, better decision making, and high returns on investments are only a few benefits that have been claimed for. When considering the fact that it is very difficult to measure any direct benefits from IT investments in general, and BI as a consequence, an interest for analyzing the arguments used for selling BI emerged.</p><p>Purpose</p><p>The purpose of this thesis is to identify what arguments vendors and suppliers use when selling BI solutions, and explore their value by analyzing them through the use of existing theories from literature.</p><p>Method</p><p>A qualitative approach has been adopted, where unstructured interviews with BI vendors and suppliers were conducted. An inductive approach has been applied to gather arguments and then shifted to a deductive, in order to finalize the study and analyze arguments with appropriate theory. The research has been performed from without the Swedish market with well-known organizations.</p><p>Conclusions</p><p>A single version of the truth, control, and time savings are credible arguments for investing in BI. Furthermore, cost savings and improved analytical capabilities are fairly credible, whereas increased efficiency has least credibility when analyzed against theories. In general, we believe that the ability to gain from these positive effects from BI, organizations have to take an active role in realizing these.</p>

<p>Historically, decision support systems have been used in organizations to facilitate better decisions. Business Intelligence has become important in recent years because the business environment is more complex and changes faster than ever before. Organizations have started to realize the value of existing information in operational, managerial, and strategic decision making. By using analytical methods and data warehousing, decision support can now be used in a flexible way and assist decision makers in decision making processes. Increasing investments in Business Intelligence indicate that it can bring value to organizations. Benefits such as the ability to access relevant and timely decision support when it is needed can be of tremendous value when the use of existing information has become more a question of survival or bankruptcy for an organization, than profit or loss. Thus, it would be interesting to see how decision support and decision making have changed in organizations after implementing a Business Intelligence system. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if and how Business Intelligence has changed decision support and decision making processes.A deductive approach using a qualitative method has been used with semi-structured elite interviews. The thesis aims to investigate the manufacturing industry located in the Jönköping region in Sweden. The interviewed organizations are Husqvarna AB, Fläkt Woods AB, Myresjöhus AB, and Kinnarps AB. Our analysis shows positive effects of Business Intelligence in organizations with improvements of decision support due to timeliness, accessibility, quality, and better control of organizational information. As improvements in decision support has occurred, decision making has become better. Complicated problems are now easier to interpret by decision makers. Our research also concludes that intuition still has a major impact in decision making processes.</p>

<p>We are facing a period that coming into information time, which forced us to live in a new living style. It seems that every business movement is related with information transformation. When computers are used to deal with business data, we begin to search a way to make digital data into refined format information in order to let people to understand. This change results in a changing of business forms. For example, e-services refer to provide a certain service or play function on line, which has the tendency to replace the place of traditional service. How this kind of service can be developed remains a question mark to us.</p><p>The challenge of e-service is how to get different functions into integration. This thesis begins to research it focusing the point view of GIS (Geography Information System). Take Google earth as an example to illustrate how GIS is being used and what possible future uses of it can be developed. By exploring its use in data collecting, and analyzing, the possible applications in business world can be obviously released.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Virginia Commonwealth University, 2009. / Prepared for: Dept. of Information Systems. Title from title-page of electronic thesis. Bibliography: leaves 168-174.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004. / Zhu, Donghua, Committee Member ; Cozzens, Susan, Committee Member ; Huo, Xiaoming, Committee Member ; Porter, Alan, Committee Chair ; Lu, Jye-Chyi, Committee Member. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-195).