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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0305-5728.htm

Business justication with business intelligence

Jayanthi Ranjan
Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, India
Abstract
Purpose The paper intends to nd out the business justications and requirements for incorporating business intelligence (BI) in organizations because many organizations that already have systems in place to collect data and gather information, often nd themselves in a situation where they have no tools or roadmaps to put their vast data and information into use for strategic decision making. Design/methodology/approach In this paper BI and the growing potential for implementing BI is explained. The paper also explains a checklist for implementing BI. Findings During the last ten years, the approach to business management in the entire globe has deeply changed. Firms have understood the importance of enforcing achievement of the goals dened by their strategy through metrics-driven management. Firms are evolving into new forms based on knowledge and networks in response to an environment characterized by indistinct organizational boundaries and fast-paced change. New and complex changes are emerging that will force enterprises to operate in entirely new methods. Understanding the data and transforming, and shaping them into networked marketplaces is a key strategy for any organization to achieve competitive advantage. The business success factor for any enterprise is nding ways to bring the vast amount of data that are owing within and across the business processes together and making sense out of them. Business Intercenine includes extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), data warehousing, database query and reporting, multidimensional/online analytical processing (OLAP) data analysis, data mining and visualization. Originality/value The paper provides useful information on business justications and requirements for incorporating business intelligence in organizations. Keywords Intelligence, Value analysis, Corporate strategy Paper type Conceptual paper

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1. Introduction In todays highly competitive and increasingly uncertain world, the quality and timeliness of an organizations business intelligence (BI) can mean not only the difference between prot and loss, but also even the difference between survival and bankruptcy. BI is the conscious, methodical transformation of data from any and all data sources into new forms to provide information that is business-driven and results-oriented. It will often encompass a mixture of tools, databases, and vendors in order to deliver an infrastructure that not only will deliver the initial solution, but also will incorporate the ability to change with the business and current marketplace. The purpose of investing in BI is to transform from an environment that is reactive to data to one that is proactive. A major goal of BI is to automate and integrate as many steps and functions as possible. Another goal is to provide data for analytics that are as tool-independent as possible (Biere, 2003). Centralized centers of competency were created to provide a means for end-users to become productive quickly. The need to set corporate standards for analysis tools was

VINE: The journal of information and knowledge management systems Vol. 38 No. 4, 2008 pp. 461-475 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0305-5728 DOI 10.1108/03055720810917714

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one of the most signicant benets from these centers. The information warehouse proved that accessing data in place are not always desirable, but capturing the metadata about existing information makes perfect sense. Before we transform current information, we need to know all we can about its current contents and form. We are entering an era where packaged BI solutions are desired. One driving force behind these is the need to deliver sophisticated metrics and analyses to top management. BI decision-support applications facilitate many activities, including: multidimensional analysis, for example, online analytical processing (OLAP); click-stream analysis; data mining; forecasting, business analysis; balanced scorecard preparation; visualization; querying; reporting and charting (including just-in-time and agent-based alerts); geospatial analysis; knowledge management; enterprise portal implementation; mining for text, content, and voice; digital dashboard access; and other cross-functional activities. Examples of BI decision-support databases include enterprise-wide data warehouses, data marts (functional and departmental), exploration warehouses (statistical), data mining databases, web warehouses (for click-stream data), operational data stores (ODSs), operational marts (oper marts), other cross-functional decision-support databases. Enterprises today are constantly trying to outpace the competition while still keeping up with changing business cycles, security, globalization and regulatory compliance. As companies struggle to respond more quickly and efciently to business change, they are forced to examine the underlying architecture that supports their business to determine future scalability. With BI, organizations can integrate powerful capabilities in business event management, analysis, reporting, score carding, data integration, dashboards, and more, all within a service-oriented architecture. This requires web services to leverage and integrate a number of technologies, improving performance and the speed with which data can be accessed. This allows organizations to maximize their investment in such infrastructure as application servers, security, RDBMS, operating systems, and metadata. The result is an open, extensible platform for gleaning and communicating BI in a distributed and dynamic enterprise. History tells us that when we build business applications we create the need for BI. Traditionally, as this capability was not built into earlier infrastructures at the outset, it is supplied via the data warehouse, some time after events have occurred not because that is what the business problem required, but because that was what the technology allowed. Some organizations are just getting started with BI and want to plan the way forward, while others are looking at their existing BI environment and determining how to make it better. A common concern for enterprises as they undertake a BI strategy initiative is ensuring that tactical information needs are being met while the organization is moving towards a more strategic approach to BI (Hostmann, 2007). Companies face a number of challenges in making business performance management more strategic and driving its application throughout the enterprise (Ruddy, 2006). These challenges include dening key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with business objectives; extending usage of those KPIs throughout a wide range of levels and functional areas within the organization; and integrating data so that executives can truly understand the impact of operational activities on nancial outcomes and on the strategic goals and objectives of the organization. Advances in

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modeling and data integration technologies will help companies overcome these barriers to more strategic use of business performance management, but organizational factors will be just as important to success (Hewlett-Packard, 2007). In this paper BI and the growing potential for implementing BI is explained. The paper is intended to nd out the business justications and business requirements to incorporate BI in organizations because many organizations that already have systems in place to collect data and gather information, many a times nd themselves in a situation where they have no tools or roadmaps to put their vast data and information into use for strategic decision making. The paper also explains the checklist for implementing BI. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 explains a clear understanding of BI and its components. Section 3 explains the issues in implementing BI. Section 4 explores the business value of BI. Section 5 describes the prospect of implementing BI. Section 6 focuses on business justication for BI. Section 7 concludes the paper. 2. BI According to Adelman et al. (2002), BI is a term that encompasses a broad range of analytical software and solutions for gathering, consolidating, analyzing and providing access to information in a way that is supposed to let an enterprises users make better business decisions, Malhotra (2000) describes BI that facilitates the connections in the new-form organization, bringing real-time information to centralized repositories and support analytics that can be exploited at every horizontal and vertical level within and outside the rm. BI describes the result of in-depth analysis of detailed business data, including database and application technologies, as well as analysis practices (Gangadharan and Swamy, 2004). BI is technically much broader, potentially encompassing knowledge management, enterprise resource planning, decision-support systems and data mining (Gangadharan and Swamy, 2004). The main key to a successful BI system is consolidating data from the many different enterprise operational systems into an enterprise data warehouse. Very few organizations have a full-edged enterprise data warehouse. This is due to the vast scope of effort towards consolidating the entire enterprise data. Berson et al. (2002) emphasize that in view of emerging highly dynamic business environment, only the most competitive enterprises will achieve sustained market success. The organizations will distinguish themselves by the capability to leverage information about their market place, customers, and operations to capitalize on the business opportunities. Moss and Atre (2003) describe BI as seamless integration of operational front-ofce applications with operational back-ofce applications. Gangadharan and Swamy (2004) dene BI as an enterprise architecture for an integrated collection of operational as well as decision support applications and databases, which provides the business community easy access to their business data and allows them to make accurate business decisions. A successful BI ties business and information technology together to help enterprises manage and integrate ongoing investments in BI, allocate BI resources, prioritize projects, and minimize the risk associated with BI implementations. The move towards BI reects organizations desire to manage their investment in and use of BI.

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BI enables the comprehension, understanding and prot from experience. Business data and information are the soil that grows BI, which provides the capability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn from business data and information. BI is fueled from the utilization of information aligned with business performance. BI is constructed on the identication and modeling of focused business information. Asking the right questions is the precursor to making intelligent decisions. BI is an important management function, and can undoubtedly benet from the range of technological innovations including web services and grid computing (Veryard, 2003). Wu et al. (2007) dened BI as business management term used to describe applications and technologies which are used to gather, provide access to and analyze data and information about the organization, to help make better business decisions. In other words, the purpose of business intelligence is to provide actionable insight BI technologies include traditional data warehousing technologies such as reporting, ad hoc querying, OLAP. A good BI strategy incorporates an iterative approach, dening seemingly discrete projects that can be easily prioritized and socialized with the appropriate constituents. This approach helps long-term BI initiatives to sustain momentum by getting stakeholder buy-in and meeting tactical needs, while keeping the enterprises long-term BI strategy in mind. In addition, this approach permits organizational change to spread throughout the enterprise in a controlled manner that fosters the development of knowledge and skills related to the BI solution. Hostmann (2007), an analyst with Gartner, discussed the most important business intelligence trends what to do about them. A well-executed strategy optimizes efciency by improving the quality of service and by supporting faster and better-informed business decisions (Karbhari, 2006). With the right capabilities in place, corporations will be able to integrate systems more quickly, connect to trading partners more easily, get better visibility into their business and respond to market opportunities with increased agility. The benets can be realized by a process-centric approach to enterprise business management, assisting business managers using technology to help them make informed decisions to improve strategic and tactical results. 2.1. BI components BI tools are widely accepted as a new middleware between transactional applications and decision support applications, thereby decoupling systems tailored to an efcient handling of business transactions from systems tailored to an efcient support of business decisions. The capabilities of BI include decision support, OLAP, statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining. The following are the major components that constitute BI. Data warehouse. The data warehouse is the signicant component of BI. It is subject oriented, integrated. The data warehouse supports the physical propagation of data by handling the numerous enterprise records for integration, cleansing, aggregation and query tasks. It can also contain the operational data that can be dened as an updateable set of integrated data used for enterprise wide tactical decision making of a particular subject area. It contains live data, not snapshots, and retains minimal history.

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Data sources. Data sources can be operational databases, historical data, external data for example, from market research companies or from the internet), or information from the already existing data warehouse environment. The data sources can be relational databases or any other data structure that supports the line of business applications. They also can reside on many different platforms and can contain structured information, such as tables or spreadsheets, or unstructured information, such as plaintext les or pictures and other multimedia information. Data mart. A data mart, as described by Inmon (1999), is a collection of subject areas organized for decision support based on the needs of a given department. Finance has their data mart, marketing has theirs, and sales have theirs and so on. And the data mart for marketing only faintly resembles anyone elses data mart. Perhaps most importantly (Inmon, 1999), the individual departments own the hardware, software, data and programs that constitute the data mart. Each department has its own interpretation of what a data mart should look like and each departments data mart is peculiar to and specic to its own needs. Similar to data warehouses, data marts contain operational data that help business experts to strategize based on analyses of past trends and experiences. The key difference is that the creation of a data mart is predicated on a specic, predened need for a certain grouping and conguration of select data. There can be multiple data marts inside an enterprise. A data mart can support a particular business function, business process or business unit. Query and reporting tools. OLAP provides multidimensional, summarized views of business data and is used for reporting, analysis, modeling and planning for optimizing the business. OLAP techniques and tools can be used to work with data warehouses or data marts designed for sophisticated enterprise intelligence systems. These systems process queries required to discover trends and analyze critical factors. Reporting software generates aggregated views of data to keep the management informed about the state of their business. Other BI tools are used to store and analyze data, such as: data mining and data warehouses; decision support systems and forecasting; document warehouses and document management; knowledge management; mapping, information visualization, and dash boarding; management information systems, geographic information systems; trend analysis; and Software as a Service (SaaS). A typical BI environment is presented in Figure 1. BI decision-support applications facilitate many activities, including, multidimensional analysis, for example, OLAP, click-stream analysis, data mining, forecasting, business analysis, balanced scorecard preparation, visualization, querying, reporting, and charting (including just-in-time and agent-based alerts), geospatial analysis, knowledge management, enterprise portal implementation, mining for text, content, and voice, digital dashboard access, other cross-functional activities. Examples of BI decision-support databases include enterprise-wide data warehouses, data marts (functional and departmental), exploration warehouses (statistical), data mining databases, web warehouses (for click-stream data), ODSs, operational marts (operational marts), other cross-functional decision-support databases. 3. Implementing BI In most deployed BI environments, multiple BI systems, each with their tools, processes and data architectures can be found across multiple business units and divisions of the enterprise (Wu et al., 2007). This access is commonly referred to as

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Figure 1. A BI environment

drill through or drill to detail in BI, and to accomplish it all data relevant to the requirement are traditionally moved into the data warehouse. In fact, this may not be allowed (such as for data protection reasons) or preferred (it increases the ETL burden and the storage requirements of the data warehouse to hold data, which by denition, is operational in nature), and it has the potential to add additional pressure on the BI platform by becoming the de facto source for all incident business services. In embedded BI, enquiries are wrapped as services and invoked from the operational systems. For example, calculating the appropriate credit limit or policy for a specic customer in real time, based on a 360-degree picture of the customer and his/her recent behavior. In integrated BI, BI activities are coordinated with one another, and synchronized with business and operations in faster and more effective business response to external change and greater consistency and coordination of planning effort across the enterprise. In collaborative BI, orchestrated BI services across a federated management or governance structure and collaboration between knowledge workers is more usual. Veryard (2003) in his report reviewed the moves that the BI vendors have already taken to support web services, and offer a framework for integrating BI more comprehensively into the service-oriented world. Veryard (2005) identied four general ways of managing and implementing BI. In stand-alone BI, BI activities are decoupled and desynchronized from the business and from operational systems. BI activities are performed by independent knowledge workers. BI is a new frontier for many enterprises. BI efforts have often been siloed as business units and functional areas have made investments to meet their own information needs with no coordination at an enterprise level. Taking a strategic approach to managing BI across business domains is a new undertaking; one that can

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get bogged down in overly academic discussions or political struggles about how BI should be structured. Despite the challenges of establishing BI, there are models for success that companies can follow to create the best BI model for their organizations. Whatever type of BI model an organization chooses, it must include strong executive sponsorship, organizational accountability, and representation of both business and IT stakeholders (Hostmann, 2007). One of the problems of BI is that one cannot dene static information needs for advanced BI requirements such as data mining. Instead, we need to produce an entire class of enquiries ranging over all possible variables that might affect business performance. The use of global delivery to support BI has matured particularly in industries such as nancial services and communications that are already aggressive adopters of global delivery methods. The decision to move BI work offshore is driven not only by cost pressures, but also by the scarcity of BI talent, the need to support enterprise growth, and the need to meet aggressive deadlines (Ruddy, 2006). In order to reap the full benets of global delivery, organizations need to be aware of special considerations that can make BI more difcult to perform offsite than other technology disciplines. For example, BI implementations demand a signicant amount of business-process knowledge that offsite resources may lack. This challenge can be met by allowing onsite resources to focus on high-value roles and projects that address business knowledge while allowing offsite resources to focus on development and maintenance activities. Another challenge lies in the potential sensitivity of data involved in BI projects (Ruddy, 2006). Organizations must make sure that appropriate security and privacy controls are in place when data are being shared offsite. 4. Business value of BI Enterprise data (including data from ERP systems, data warehouses, operational data stores and other sources) is one of the assets of an organization, and builds the competitive advantage that ensures corporate success. But data are often fragmented, incomplete and not readily available in a form that can be used effectively. To realize its benets, data from a variety of sources needs to be turned into information that can be used consistently across divisions and business units. The key to realizing the potential of enterprise-wide data lies in implementing an open data strategy for BI enabling data consolidation to create a unied view of the enterprise resulting in better performance. Firms are (Evans and Wurster, 2000; DAveni, 1994) experiencing environmental changes resulting from the new economics of information and the increasingly dynamic and global nature of competition. Therefore as pointed out by Dijksterhuis et al. (1999) organizational survival depends on the construction and integration of knowledge fostering the adaptation to the environment, as well as stimulating environmental changes through the rms knowledge and practices. The key drivers examined by (Doherty et al., 2003) for underlining change are the application of information technologies and systems in any organization. IT now is ubiquitous and increasingly critical part of the fabric of the modern organization, supporting its day-to-day operations and all aspects of the decision-making process as well as its strategic position. As a result (Mahoney, 2002), the investments in IT that enable differentiation are of ever-increasing importance.

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Several surveys, including Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, report that most of the rms are interested in investing in BI. It is to be noted that despite major investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) over the last decade businesses are struggling to achieve competitive advantage. It is due to the information captured by these systems. Any corporate would look forward for one goal called right access to information quickly. Hence the rms need to support the analysis and application of information captured in order to make operational decisions. Say for marking seasonal merchandise or providing certain recommendations to customers, rms need right access to information quickly. Implementing smarter business processes is where BI inuences and impacts the bottom line and returns value to any rm. Realize that the BI process essentially revolves around the ability to ow large amounts of disparate data into a single repository and then in turn to ow restructured data for decision-support purposes out to data marts and related analytic process (Loshin, 2003). Wu et al. (2007) described a service-oriented architecture for business intelligence that makes possible a seamless integration of technologies into a coherent business intelligence environment, thus enabling simplied data delivery and low-latency analytics. Wu et al. (2007) compared the service-oriented approach with traditional BI architectures, illustrate the advantages of the service oriented paradigm and share our experience and the lessons learned in architecting and implementing the framework. Complexities increase as the business or the environment become more dynamic, i.e. where change is a permanent feature and a factor to build into the management of the business. The key question that arises is how businesses that respond to changes today do and, if the nature of the business and the environment is becoming more and more dynamic (Azvine et al., 2007), what actions can businesses take to predict and prepare for change. To accomplish this, it is essential to have a system for establishing the status of a business at any moment in time in relation to its performance objectives. An important component of this investment is in BI. Coined by Gartner in the early 1990s, the term BI denotes an analytic process that transforms internal and external data into information about capabilities, market positions, activities, and goals that the company should pursue in order to stay competitive. BI includes data warehousing, but also requires a reactive component capable of monitoring the time-critical operational processes to allow tactical and operational decision-makers to tune their actions according to the company strategy (Golfarelli et al., 2004). BI stands for information system concepts like OLAP, querying and reporting, or data mining that provide different methods for a exible goal-driven analysis of business data, provided through a central data pool. BI has emerged from the central part of this strategy for long-term sustainable success. Everett (2006) reported that in the rst-ever research on service-oriented architecture (SOA) for BI, only one-third (33 percent) of respondents reported they believed their internal IT personnel have the knowledge and skills to implement BI services. The research revealed that companies are concerned about visibility and management of services, security, meeting service level agreements and reuse of services. According to a research report of IBMs BI section, it is not enough for an ETL tool to just grab data and dump it in a data warehouse; One needs the data that have made it into the warehouse, and the data that might be part of the business processes;

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business process monitoring and business activity monitoring is about a holistic perspective on the historical and current data. It is all about synergies between the warehouse and business processes; it is all about unication around XML because XML is the way business processes are communicating the data. Several surveys, including Gartner, Forrester and International Data Centre report that most of the rms throughout the globe are interested in investing in BI. It is to be noted that despite major investments in ERP and CRM over the last decade businesses are struggling to achieve competitive advantage. It is due to the information captured by these systems. Any corporate would look forward for one goal called right access to information quickly. Hence, the rms need to support the analysis and application of information in order to make operational decisions. Say for marking seasonal merchandise or providing certain recommendations to customers, rms need right access to information quickly. Implementing smarter business processes is where business intelligence inuences and inuences the bottom line and returns value to any rm. Many BI applications today do not provide the functionality or capabilities that users require in order to do their jobs. Some applications suffer from lock-in to existing technology or platforms that are no longer the best choice. Other solutions are not oriented for change; they do not allow organizations to adapt quickly enough to evolving market conditions. Here, the scalability is also an issue; as organizations grow, their BI technology must scale quickly as well. The service-oriented architecture offers a solution. To make the kind of real-time decisions required in enterprises today, business users must be able to sort through an increasing volume of knowledge and information quickly while still maintaining high operational efciency. A few years ago, users were accustomed to waiting long periods of time to have their requests fullled. Today, however, they require the ability to use their own dashboards, control their embedded analytics and generate their own reports through a standard browser interface; with the right BI tools integrated using a comprehensive framework (Karbhari, 2006). 5. Prospects in implementing BI Without strong business drivers and without an alignment with the strategic business goals of the organization, the BI decision-support initiative may falter (Moss and Atre, 2003). The core and major challenges the corporates face in todays competitive environment is management of data, lter the useful data and transform the ltered data into useful knowledge of business decisions. Some enterprise may generate terabytes of data and some rms may hold a few mega bytes. The survival of a company depends on its data, regardless of the amount stored. Browning et al. (2007) emphasize the midsize businesses to recognize transformation of their terabytes of data, for good insights and analysis to make better decisions. For this purpose, many rms have been heavily investing in information technology to help them to manage their business decisions more effectively and gain a competitive advantage. By implementing from ERP to CRM, SCM, and e-commerce applications, the rms have taken a big step and role in automating the business processes (Jaiswal and Mital, 2004). But many companies are not able to capitalize the value of the automated wealth of information due to implicitness in the data. The leading corporates have recognized that the business world is knowledge-intensive with innovative-or-die approaches. All corporates utilize

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the technology for storing and managing enterprise-related data. Organizations using ERP, SCM, and CRM generate huge operational data, which are processed by BI for decision making. Cates et al. (2005) describe a framework for adopting BI in enterprises by showcasing how it benets any business organization. The author believes that this framework if adopted will be extremely useful for all business models. Globalization and constant modernization have brought new challenges and prospects for corporates. Managing cash ows and retaining human resources were yesterdays challenges in business world. The key challenge today in corporates is ensuring top line growth with large supply chain the enable them fast and better decisions. If there is no problem with data, and if everything in the business is running smoothly and everyone in the organization get the data they need, then the rm does not need BI (Whitehorn and Whitehorn, 1999). If the organization has several branches and multi locations, achieving business goals is a huge key challenge. For better long-term relations beneting both the organization and customer, rms need business analytics. This is particularly true when organizations implement a number of heterogeneous applications. It becomes very difcult to collate and analyze data from these applications for reporting purposes. One may try to consider cost, exibility, functionality and time as critical success factors for implementing BI. Haspeslagh et al. (2001) describe value-based management for measuring business. But considering future roadmaps, the power of open architectures and industry proven solutions it is necessary for all rms to adapt BI. Loshin (2003) and Biere (2003) intuitively challenge senior managers in organizations regarding their awareness towards BI. An example of such scenario is mentioned below:
A sales executive wants to see all the sales for the past ve years where protability has been greater than say x percent. He wishes to see it monthly. Further, he wants to see whether the sales team has been in place during this period or whether there has been personnel turnover where the protability percentages have been greater than y percent. He also wishes to see trends in protability, where all sales by year have steadily increased for z percent at least two years in a row, he wishes to see the top ve products ranked by protability.

Here BI helps to play safe. The author is not emphasizing that all big rms should implement BI. Budhwar (2007) points out that if the organization is growing and expanding, (like banks, telecommunications, retail and insurance) and if the numbers of customers are bundling to millions, then there is a need to understand the reports to keep track of the patterns, growth segments, market potentials and customer behavior changes. For forecasting and creating strategies, analysis of cross-tabulated massive data are essential. 6. Business justication with BI The growing potential for BI can be attributed to the reason that many organizations that already have systems in place to collect data and gather information, often nd themselves in a situation where they have no tools or roadmaps to put their vast data and information into use for strategic decision making. For any quick analysis, BI-based solutions are the suitable option. For example, in production all the relevant data may be there to show the correct production of each and every inventory item not

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only in terms of time, but also about each production belt and batch. In sales, one can easily visualize the future prospect of any business through the facts of gures the current market shifts and process according its present rating and accounting market trend. Forecasting the demand or stocks that will arise in any period of time depending on the season, buyer and customer behavior is possible. BIs success does not lie in the volume of usage or paper generated but success is measured through its impact in business and by the improvements in critical areas that can be attributed to its implementation. Researchers have been stressing (Kudyba and Diwan, 2002; Carr, 2003; Hoblitzell, 2002) business strategies that create increasing value over time with a future-focused orientation for achieving long-term goals. A rm sometimes is lucky enough to discover the positive effect on increasing the level of information ow in the business. This makes the end-users happy as they get more information. Based on this one cannot assume whether the positive effect has changed the bottom line. Research shows that the main serious concern for organizations is undelivered IT value (Santhanam and Hartono, 2003; Dedrick et al., 2003). Moss and Atre (2003) look at the possibilities of building BI solutions. Consider a rm willing to increase its revenue by decreasing time to market. This means the translation of building BI applications as fast as possible, no matter what other effects this might have (when speed goes up quality may go down). If the objective of BI is to decrease operating costs by increasing productivity then it leads to building BI applications that deliver business process improvements no matter what it takes (when quality goes up, speed goes down). In this scenario, the organizations strategic goal and the BI application objective are both crucial business drivers for building a BI solution. However, because the strategic goal and the BI application objective are not compatible in terms of speed and quality issues, it will be difcult to get managements support for this BI application (Moss and Atre, 2003). Most sophisticated organizations often do not have easily accessible or well-articulated strategic business goals statements. This is done only through thoroughly reviewing the organizations annual report, public statements, newspaper coverage, syndicated articles, and internal memos for valuable information. Business justication is an iterative process. As difcult as it might be to justify the business case, one should realize that business managers are aware of the buzz about BI and would like to take advantage of any competitive benet they can get. Reiterating the benets will help crystallize the business justication and make everyone feel comfortable about funding BI projects (Moss and Atre, 2003). 7. Guidelines for implementing BI Biere (2003) provides the important checklists and guidelines for any rm to consider before implementing BI. Cates et al. (2005) provide steps for successful implementation of BI framework in organizations. Miller et al. (2006) give good recommendations for an effective BI in any business organization. The author provides here some guidelines that can be considered for BI implementation in an organization: (1) Requirements from rm perspective: . Corporate mission and vision statement. . Reasons for embracing a centralized, managed approach to BI. . Justication of BI acquisitions using the following processes: application specic use;

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end-user surveys and requests; and IT decisions.

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Tracking and measuring the BI efforts and BI support structure. Role of individual departments and functional areas in selecting and maintaining their own BI strategies, tools, databases, etc. (2) Details of users and corporate standards: . Details of a thorough end-user segmentation and evaluation methodology. . Details of a standard for BI tools: education and support. . Details of end users requirements to the current tools. . Details of corporate infrastructure (user group, newsletter, etc.) for BI and their processes. . Documented and approved BI strategy for external and internal users. . Details of percentages in time and expense for BI activities. (3) Details of databases, tools and vendors: . Details of enterprise-wide database. . Database strategy and corporate strategy for BI for thin client access. . Analytics tools and their architecture requirements. . Details of BI database architectures, data warehouse, data marts, federated (multi-source) data access, OLAP, and others. . Details of BI database decisions based on: technology (features, functions, etc.); platform regardless of the vendors solutions BI-specic functionality (specic analytic functions) IT preferences and standards, cost, etc. Details of vendors: vendor applications and packages. Details of BI budget, including software costs, hardware upgrades, user training and education, outside consulting services (if any). . Details of available BI tools and their impact on existing processes. (4) Others requirements: . Details of production libraries and production databases, the daily, weekly, and monthly extract/transform/load (ETL) processes on the job scheduler. . Details of regularly scheduled application report programs, scheduled metadata repository programs. . Concerns of operations staff towards quality assurance (QA) test results. . Details of security measures, user authentication services, database maintenance, backup and recovery procedure, and disaster recovery procedure. . Concerns of the business people receiving training.
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8. Conclusion BI, with the use of technology, collects and effectively uses information to improve business potency. An ideal BI system gives an organization easy access to the information they need to effectively do and the ability to analyze and easily share this information with others. BI provides critical insights that help organizations make right decisions. It facilitates scrutinizing every aspect of business operations to nd new revenue or squeeze out additional cost savings by increasing return on investment and supplying decision-support information. In this paper BI and the growing potential for implementing BI is explained; The paper is intended to nd out the business justications and business requirements to incorporate BI in organizations because many organizations that already have systems in place to collect data and gather information, often nd themselves in a situation where they have no tools or roadmaps to put their vast data and information into use for strategic decision making. The paper also explains the checklist for implementing BI.
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Veryard, R. (2003), Web services to improve business intelligence, CBDI Service Oriented Architecture Practice Portal Journal, available at: www.cbdiforum.com/report_summary. php3?page /secure/interact/200306/bi.php3&area silver (accessed March 25, 2006). Veryard, R. (2005), Service-oriented business intelligence 2: what can soa offer to business intelligence?, available at: http://Rvsoapbox.Blogspot.Com/Search/Label/Bi (accessed September 2006). Whitehorn, M. and Whitehorn, M. (1999), Business Intelligence: The IBM Solution: Data Warehousing and OLAP, Springer Series, Springer, New York, NY, pp. 9-10. Wu, L., Barash, G. and Bartolini, C. (2007), A service-oriented architecture for business intelligence, IEEE International Conference on Service-oriented Computing and Applications, SOCA 07, pp. 279-85. About the author Jayanthi Ranjan is a PhD from Jamia Millia ISlamia central university, India in the eld of data mining and has 15 years of teaching experience. She graduated from Venkateswara University, Tirupathi with gold medal in Mathematics and University rank. She has done her Master of Computer Applications from Avinashilingam Womens deemed University, Coimbatore. She has published various papers on data clustering, data mining, database security, business intelligence, educational technologies that have appeared in International Journal of Business Information Systems, International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, Journal of Applied and Theoretical Information Technology, Information Technology Journal, International Journal of Technology Management, etc. She has had 46 publications in various international journals, national and international conference proceedings to date. She is also a member of the Course Moderation Board in India. She has guided more than 90 projects for postgraduate students. She has also conducted several training programs in data mining and business intelligence. Her teaching and research interests include data mining and building data warehouses, information systems analysis and design, information agents building and business intelligence. She is a life member of the Indian Society for Technical Education, the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering and the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS). She serves on the editorial board for the international journal titled Information Technology Journal, Asian Network for Scientic Information. She has published papers in the International Journal of Agile Systems Management, International Journal of Business Information Systems, International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, Vine: The Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, and Information Technology Journal. She is also the chairman, International Relations, IMT Ghaizbad. Jayanthi Ranjan can be contacted at: jranjan@imt.edu

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