Literature Review of Business Intelligence

Paper Summary:

The paper evaluates the competitive advantage of organizations that focus on dashboard and scorecard technologies, through the use of business intelligence (BI) processes. The paper states that companies from service industries rely on an analytics platform that unifies all their databases and systems into a single BI strategy. The paper highlights the fact that dashboards and scorecards are used for organizing the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) within Web-based applications that are viewed in all organizations. The paper then concludes that, as a result of their pervasive reporting, functionality and increase in accountability over results, dashboards and scorecards are changing the culture of many organizations.

Outline:
Synopsis
The Return on Investment (ROI) of Dashboards and Scorecards
Competitive Advantages of Dashboards and Scorecards
More precise supply chain planning and management alleviating out-of-stock conditions and more optimal inventory management
Manufacturing performance transformed from being a cost center to a source of competitive advantage through the use of dashboards and scorecards
Measuring the impact and ROI of marketing and sales strategies in real-time for competitive advantage
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"The unmet needs that dashboards and scorecards are created to address often serve as the catalyst for line-of-business managers asking for them to be created in their organizations. Yet to get a dashboard or scorecard created, line-of-business managers nearly always must rely on their Information Technologies (IT) department to analyze the underlying processes that the dashboard will be used to provide information for, then a systems analysis and development plan must be created to integrate systems that may not be interlinked or integrated today (Hedgebeth, 2007). This second step is essential for getting the necessary data into a single system of record (Pestorius, 2007) so that the necessary metrics and KPIs can be calculated and then published into the dashboard or scorecard. Software companies that produce BI applications and tools have continually been adding to the feature set of integration utilities, beginning to offer Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) workflow tools that are used to streamline the underlying processes dashboards and scorecards are used for reporting from (Burns, 2005). As a result of these developments in integration functionality, feature sets, and the use of BI applications to streamline processes through BPM and BPR functions, the costs of BI applications that are used for creating dashboards and scorecards has dropped significantly in the last three years (Gantovich, 2007) and is now hovering in the $100,000 range for entire BI suites of applications that make it possible to create dashboards and scorecards relatively quickly. The integration of BPM, BPR and BI, including the ability to quantify the pay-off of redefining key processes that accounting, financial, operations, marketing, sales and service departments of an organization rely on is becoming the new standard by which companies measure their dashboard and scorecard projects (Floyd, 2003). The underlying platforms used for supporting BPM and BI integration also include portal-based technologies at the presentation layers of their architectures, which also minimizes the time required on the part of IT staffs to implement dashboards and scorecards on the part of line-of-business managers (Politiano, 2007). Examples of these platforms includes Microsoft's SharePoint Services platform, oracle's Fusion platform that incorporates that company's acquisition of Hyperion BI applications, and SAP's NetWeaver Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), all of which support analytics functionality as a foundational part of their architectures (Howson, 2007). Dashboards are proliferating throughout organizations globally due to the economies of BI applications and the opportunity IT departments see for being able to re-define processes that have been need in improvement (Williams, 2007). The impact of this proliferation of dashboards within many organizations is an accentuated level of accountability and performance measurement, in addition to urgency around tactics that increase the KPIs performance of interest in the short term (Dover, 2004). The competitive advantage that emanates from the rapid ROI which is attainable through the development, deployment and use of dashboards are discussed in the following section of this paper, yet the immediate gain is averting risks from making decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information versus the use of real-time data. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• I Elaine Allen (2007). Beyond the Balanced Scorecard. Review of medium_being_reviewed title_of_work_reviewed_in_italics. Quality Progress, 40(8), 72. Retrieved March 19, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1334726371).
• B. Azvine, Z. Cui, D. D. Nauck. (2005). Towards real-time business intelligence. BT Technology Journal, 23(3), 214. Retrieved March 14, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 894760751).
• B. Azvine, Z. Cui, B. Majeed, M. Spott. (2007). Operational risk management with real-time business intelligence. BT Technology Journal, 25(1), 154-167. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1238704591).
• Michael Burns (2005, June). Business intelligence survey. CA Magazine, 138(5), 18. Retrieved March 17, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 865601201).
• Colin Dover (2004). HOW dashboards CAN CHANGE YOUR CULTURE. Strategic Finance, 86(4), 42-45+. Retrieved March 19, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 715239241).

More papers on Literature Review of Business Intelligence:

• Dissertation or Thesis # 111501 : "SAP Netweaver"
• Research Paper # 60805 : "E-Commerce"
• Research Proposal # 144808 : "Money Laundering in Saudi Arabia (KSA)"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: