Business Intelligence and Analytics

Between the two given case studies, in my opinion, the business version was far more appealing.  The case study is actually from the book, Bridging the Socio-technical Gap in Decision Support Systems and the section title is A Participatory Case Study of Business Intelligence Systems Development.  The specific system that is being utilized by the chosen case study is an Oracle based Business Intelligence system with a participatory case method, as Arnott determines, “…an exploratory case study concerning the development of a large-scale enterprise-wide BI implementation.” (Arnott, 2010).  Looking further into the method that is utilized during the case study process, which is the participatory research method. 

The participatory research method comprises a vast range of different methodological tactics and techniques, all of which have an objective of granting power from the researcher to the participants, who are normally community members.  During the participatory research, the actual participants have full control over the research agenda, process, and actions.  More importantly, the people are able to analyze and reflect on the data gathered and generated, to acquire the verdicts and decisions of the research process.  Thus, as described within the case study by Arnott (2010):

Participant observation was valuable in this case because the researcher, as a participant observer, was allowed access to research data that would not have otherwise been possible in non-participant observation. There are very few examples of participatory research in BI systems development in the literature, and this case example highlights the advantages of the approach by providing a rich, contextual analysis of the research data. (p. 34)

As discussed within the case study, the various justifications for selecting the Business Intelligence tool, consists of the license agreements, low-cost solutions, product support, user friendly data and style, overall presentation and productivity increase.  To ensure success of the project as a long-term solution, an evaluation was performed on the current BI toolset being utilized.  As they leveraged the current license agreement that Monash had with Oracle, which allowed them to opt for lower costs.  Overall, Arnott states that, “A key requirement of this evaluation was to choose a product that would increase business user’s ability to easily access, query and analyze data in the style that they require.” (Arnott, 2010, p. 208).

The original problem-set that triggered the case study research was the lack of available in-depth evidence pertaining to development research literature of Business Intelligence systems, much less a “large-scale enterprise-wide Business Intelligence implementation” (Arnott, 2010).  Although, there are various research studies available, but none of which contained practical relevance for an industry.  As seen in the case study described by Arnott (2010):

Arnott and Pervan [9] found that only 10.1% of decision support systems (DSS) research was regarded as having a high or very high practical relevance. Worryingly, 49.2% of research was regarded as having little, low or no practical relevance at all. (p. 2)

If Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the collection and analysis of information to get ahead of the competitive activity, view the historical disruptions in the market, and objectively interpret all of the events.  Thus, this process is an essential component to the development of many business strategies.  Considering, the competitive intelligence analysis can provide the necessary insight into the different marketplace dynamics and their challenges within a structured, disciplined, and ethical manner using published and non-published sources.  Therefore, the competitive intelligence gathered consists of the data provided by utilizing the content, context, and process (CCP).  The context portion consists of reviewing the various counterparts, their role, how they would be affected and their background.  Whereas, the content is mainly worried about all of the areas that would undergo some sort of transformation and what exactly would be changing.  Information pertaining to this consists of requirements, functionality, technical and logical architectures.  Lastly, the process concentrates specifically on the end game, such as the final product.  What is to be gained and how will it be executed in the end, are the main concerns.

The business intelligence applications and data processes utilized during the evaluation and measurement phase of the study consisted of a few applications and gathering data from various locations in different ways.  Implementation of a system named TARDIS, would allow the staff members to easily access predefined research-related charts and reports from an intranet site.  These reports were merely based on scripts that are hard coded in SQL but did not grant flexibility and scalable.  As Arnott discussed, “The current BI toolset at Monash uses Oracle BI Standard Edition as the reporting access and presentation layer software.” (Arnott, 2010).  Other various business intelligence applications consist of the operational systems, such as the research systems, educational management, and even the human resource system.  The data warehouse component and the business intelligence presentation tool can also be considered a business intelligence application utilized during this process.  Arnott (2010) describes the framework:

The project has adopted a rigorous extract, transform and load (ETL) framework. This manages the approach in which the data from the source systems is sourced and managed within the BI architecture. It is intended to establish a standard way of developing a robust and scalable ETL process. (p. 206)

The collection of data was done in a couple different ways, such as onsite observation, interviews that were both unstructured and semi-structured, review of project documentation, and informal social interaction with various participants.  Strategizing the participation within the case study research by adopting an unconcealed approach when attaining access, allowed for less ethical issues than a covert approach would have.  An overt approach when conducting a research can provide an appropriate amount of data access and is overall considered a straightforward execution.  Also, the researcher took a participant-observer role within the case study and diligently stepped away from the environment to ensure time for reflection.  This facilitated mitigating any risks of becoming too involved and helped preserve overall objectivity.

References

Arnott, M. G. (2010). A Participatory Case Study of Business Intelligence Systems Development. In A. Respicio, Bridging the Socio-technical Gap in Decision Support Systems: Challenges for the Next Decade (pp. 199 - 210). Monash, Australia: EBSCO Publishing. doi:10.3233/978-1-60750-577-8-199