Organizations use Business Intelligence (BI) systems to monitor how well they are meeting
their goals and objectives. Yet, very often BI systems do not include clear models of
the organization’s goals or of how to measure whether they are satisfied or not. Several
researchers now attempt to integrate goal models into BI systems, but there are still major
challenges related to how to get access to the BI data to populate the part of the goal
model (often indicators) used to assess goal satisfaction.
This thesis explores a new approach to integrate BI systems with goal models. In
particular, it explores the integration of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, a leading BI
tool, with an Eclipse-based goal modeling tool named jUCMNav. jUCMNav is an open
source graphical editor for the User Requirements Notation (URN), which includes the
Use Case Map notation for scenarios and processes and the Goal-oriented Requirement
Language for business objectives. URN was recently extended with the concept of Key
Performance Indicator (KPI) to enable performance assessment and monitoring of business
processes. In jUCMNav, KPIs are currently calculated or modified manually. The
new integration proposed in this thesis maps these KPIs to report elements that are generated
automatically by Cognos based on the model defined in jUCMNav at runtime, with
minimum effort. We are using IBM Cognos Mashup Service, which includes web services
that enable the retrieval of report elements at the most granular level. This transformation
provides managers and analysts with useful goal-oriented and process-oriented
monitoring views fed by just-in-time BI information. This new solution also automates
retrieving data from Cognos servers, which helps reducing the high costs usually caused
by the amount of manual work required otherwise.
The novel approach presented in this thesis avoids manual report generation and
minimizes any contract with respect to the location of manually created reports, hence
leading to better usability and performance. The approach and its tool support are illustrated
with an ongoing example, validated with a case study, and verified through testing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OOU.#10393/23540 |
| Date | 26 November 2012 |
| Creators | Johari Shirazi, Iman |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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