Network Intelligence Studies

Volume II, Issue 1 (3), 2014

Cătălina Monica ALEXE,

Cristina Petronela SIMION,
Cătălin George ALEXE
University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest,
Faculty of Entrepreneurship, Business Engineering and Management

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE – Literature

reviews
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Keywords
Business Intelligence
Cloud Computing
Mobile Business Intelligence
Cloud Business Intelligence

JEL
M15

Abstract

In a society constantly evolving, with information technologies being in a permanent

transformation, the managers of agile, flexible organizations, which are equipped with the
latest tools for making decisions and with people well trained to use them, will be able to
successfully meet the challenges of the future.
This paper presents the evolution of Business Intelligence and a comparative analysis
between two modern developments of it, such as Mobile Business Intelligence and Cloud
Business Intelligence, with accent on the advantages, disadvantages, implications and
benefits at the company level. These are useful tools suitable for the management of the
companies that are obliged to operate in a global economy facing with crisis.

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1. Introduction analyzing business information;

Nowadays, many companies have to technologies used in those processes; and
handle with many obstacles such as the the product as “the information
financial and economic crises, too many (knowledge) obtained from these
regulations, too much complexity, and are processes”.
willing to improve their processes of The Benefits of Business Intelligence to a
making decisions by implementing company could be to:
Business Intelligence systems.  Establish the best selling products
The managerial teams of the companies, and find out if they maintain their
regardless their size, can achieve a validity in all sales points of the
sustainable competitive advantage by company,
looking carefully into how they make  Establish the inventory of a product
decisions, slow or rapidly, using or parts of it,
adequately the modern technologies  Determine those customers whose
provided by IT companies. purchases are reduced in order to
offer special incentives to keep
2. Approaches of Business Intelligence them,
For the first time, the concept of “business  Determine and pursue performance
intelligence” was used in an article by metrics in order to adopt
Hans Peter Luhn, an IBM researcher, in corrective actions if it is
1958. Luhn's point of view was “Business necessary,
is a collection of activities carried on for  Apply scorecards and dashboards
whatever purpose, be it science, for executives in order to rapidly
technology, commerce, industry, law, recognize the operational
government, defence etc. The exceptions, or the moment when
communication facility serving the conduct expenses will probably exceed
of a business may be referred to as an the budget,
intelligence system. … Intelligence is the  Compare sales on certain dates of
ability to apprehend the interrelationships the year, from one year to
of presented facts in such a way as to another, and to predict the sales
guide action towards a desired goal.” for the next year,
(Luhn, 1958).  Integrate historic and operational
In the 1990s the concept of BI (Business data for analysis purposes, to
Intelligence) became widely used, just provide the accuracy and
after Howard Dresner has launched the consistency of the truth within the
idea that the data in IT systems can be organization,
exploited by the business itself, or as he  Follow the customers’ orders and
mentions “BI - a broad category of the dates of shipping the goods, in
software and solutions for gathering, order to adapt the production
consolidating, analyzing and providing cycle and the supply chain to
access to data in a way that lets enterprise reduce the cost for carry and the
users make better business decisions” cost for inventory.
(Gibson, Arnott, Jagielska & Melbourne, Business Intelligence solutions market is
2004). still at a low level in Romania compared to
The most recent scientific papers define other markets, but technological and
Business Intelligence from three points of economic situation increases the interest
view as seen in Table 1 (see Appendix). for such solutions company, is presented in
Shariat and Hightower (2007) characterize an analysis done by Relevance, a company
BI as a mix of processes, technologies and dedicated to the development of Business
products: processes for collecting and Intelligence solutions (Relevance, 2013).

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The local market of Business Intelligence development environment for enterprise

solutions is less developed, but with applications. As a result, IT application
interesting insights into the future. developers (after Gartner's estimates more
In January 2013, the Romanian developer than 100, at present) will focus on
of BI solutions, Relevance, recommended expanding the user interface models using
to the companies from Romania: voice and video to connect people in new
 to build a 2-3 year term strategy and different ways, with implications on
about Business Intelligence changing the user behaviour, addressing to
solutions, her or his emotions and actions.
 to properly identify the value of the The Internet of everything. The Internet
business and expands into the company's assets and the
 to test it together with the potential consumer goods such as televisions, cars,
supplier, before making a major home facilities and so on.
investment in a Business Hybrid cloud and IT as service broker. In
Intelligence solution. the future, cloud service brokerages will
The advance of mobile technologies, social evolve and the private cloud services will
networks, lower prices for IT equipment, be designed with the possibility of
and the economic crisis have caused major interoperability, in order to combine the
changes in the behaviour of end customers personal clouds with the external private
and of the companies. The speeds of cloud services.
producing information and of circulating Cloud/client architecture. Because mobile
higher data volumes have increased users continue to demand more complex
considerably, so grew the need to identify uses of their mobile technologies, it will
the opportunities for business and to make lead to a need for higher levels of server-
adequate decisions. side computing and storage capacity.
The era of personal cloud. The need for
3. Trends of Business Intelligence increasingly more personal cloud
Ten strategic technology trends in 2014 technologies will lead to a shift towards
were presented at Gartner services and surpassing the devices.
Symposium/ITxpo 2013 in Orlando, where 3-D printing. The increase of 3-D printers
were gathered tens of thousands of IT is projected to 75% in 2014, and 200% in
executives, in October 2013. Among other 2015. Therefore, 3-D printing is a real and
aspects of interests, those trends were viable mean to reduce costs through the
referred to (High, 2013): achievement of improved designs,
Mobile device diversity and management. streamlined prototyping and short-run
The variety of devices and contexts of use, manufacturing.
allow access to work in any place, this has Smart machines. Among the smart
put pressure on companies in the machines which will be thriving in the
information technology and financial future, will be included: smart advisors,
services. In future, mobile workforce size autonomous vehicles, personal assistants
will increase (using bring with your own contextually aware, and advanced global
device (BYOD) programs) and companies industrial systems
will need to define their expectations for Web-scale IT. A web-scale IT is a
the employee-owned hardware in order to combination of large cloud service
find the balance between the adaptability providers as Google, Amazon and
of the company and the need of the Salesforce.com which re-inventing the
confidentiality. way of delivering IT services, focusing on
Mobile apps and applications. Improved the aspects of scale, speed and agility. In
performance of JavaScript will allow future, IT organizations should align with
HTML5 and browser to become the main and emulate the processes, architectures,

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and practices of these leading cloud  Today’s mobile workforce requires

providers. the ability to access and analyze
Software-defined anything. Software data simply and in a
which defines anything (SDx) refers to straightforward manner, using an
improved standards for infrastructure intuitive interface such as touch-
programming and interoperability of data screen or designed to support
centres lead by automation towards cloud gestures;
computing, Dev Ops and a rapidly  The most important criterion
supplying of the infrastructure. valorised by the people in the
DevOps (Development and Operations) is organizations willing to
a method of developing software which is implement mobile BI is ease of
focusing on the communication and accessing and use.
collaboration among the following The analysis shows that the top supplier is
departments: development, quality MicroStrategy, which qualifies as number
assurance and production. one vendor and is followed by 10 other
important vendors: IBM, SAP, QlikTech,
4. Mobile Business Intelligence Information Builders, Yellowfin, Tableau
Mobile Business Intelligence is the ability Software, Roambi, SAS, Oracle and
of the persons to access BI related data arcplan.
such as dashboards, key performance A Dresner’s study over the mobile BI
indicators, business metrics, and on mobile adoption by organizations of different
devices. The concept of mobile BI has its sizes, conducted in 2012, revealed that
origin back to the early 1990s when (Dresner, 2013):
mobile phone use first began to become  Introduction of mobile BI is fairly
widespread. Companies which support modest;
mobile BI have immediately seen the  Majority of organizations report
potential of the mobile phones to simplify that fewer than 10% of users have
the distribution of business-critical data to access;
mobile or being away workers. However,  Adoption is less than 10% for 48%
the era of smartphones generated of small organizations and for
widespread attention for mobile business 87% of large organizations;
intelligence, for more than a decade.  20% of small business participants
Vertana Research, in 2014, examined report that their mobile BI
business intelligence on mobile technology introduction is 81% or higher.
to determine current and planned use of Therefore, adoption in the small
the organizations and the capabilities organizations is significant.
required for successful deployment. The  Organizations of all sizes said they
study revealed that (Cosentino, 2014): will be using mobile BI
 40% of organizations are interested substantially by 2015.
in mobile BI and wish to improve The analysis shows that although there is
the use of information; little progress from year to year, the hope
 Fewer than 50% currently access is the young people by their engaging into
BI capabilities on mobile devices; organizations, they will come with new
 71% expect their mobile work breath of knowledge and use of mobile BI.
force to be able to access BI
capabilities in the next 12 5. Cloud computing and Cloud Business
months; Intelligence
 Nearly 50% of executives said that In the 1950s, the concept of cloud
mobility is very important to their computing has became visible with the
BI processes; development of the microchip and of the

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mainframe computer. Users were able to their businesses with BI and analytics tools
access the computer through terminal or (Gurjar & Rathore, 2013).
client computers and, to promote efficient Cloud Business Intelligence offers some
use of CPU (Central Processing Unit – the important advantages over on-premise
“brain” of the computer) resources, the applications, such as:
practice of time-sharing and multi-tenancy  Ease of use - Cloud Business
(includes three levels of consumer Intelligence applications, like
integration: data centre, infrastructure and other cloud applications, are
application) evolved. From the 1960s to easier for end-users to set up and
the late 1990s, improvements to time- operate. This means reduced costs
sharing models, server balancing and and less IT involvement.
remote access (VPN – Virtual Private  Accessibility - Cloud Business
Network extends a private network across Intelligence applications can be
a public network, such as the Internet) laid accessed on any mobile device or
the groundwork for what would come on any web browser.
during the dot-com boom in the early  Better Data Connectivity - Easily
2000s. automate data transfer from other
The rapid development of computing cloud business applications, such
power and the emergence of the internet as CRM or marketing automation,
during the 1990s opened the way for via ready-made cloud connectors.
important developments in cloud  Scalability and elasticity - Cloud
computing. Early pioneers like Google, applications can be quickly scaled
Salesforce, and Amazon support the ability to adapt for an increase in the
of the cloud to deliver computing power number of users within an
independently of hardware and locally organization.
installed software. Since the middle of  Deployment speed - Cloud
2000s, the cloud computing industry has applications are very easy to
grown exponentially, and will become an implement, since they require no
industry of $210 billion by 2016 software installations or
(Columbus, 2013). additional hardware.
 Security - All important cloud
NIST (National Institute of Standard and computing vendors provide data
Technology) defines cloud computing as: centres with the latest virtual and
“A model for enabling convenient, on- physical security practices.
demand network access to a shared pool of Indicee uses Amazon Web
configurable computing resources (e.g., Services’ (AWS) secure data
networks, servers, storage, applications, centres in the USA. The software
and services) that can be rapidly supports the latest browser
provisioned and released with minimal security technology, protects data
management effort or service provider in transit with end-to-end SSL v3
interaction.” (Mell & Grance, 2011) encryption, and assigns to every
Cloud Business Intelligence is a new customer a separate database.
concept of delivering business intelligence Cloud is a major part of the future of
capabilities ―”as service” using cloud Business Intelligence and offers several
based architecture that comes at a lower advantages in terms of availability, cost
cost yet faster deployment & elasticity. benefits, speed and flexibility of
Software as a Service (SAAS) BI is also deployment.
being used by many small and medium
sized enterprises who seek to speed up

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6. Social Business Intelligence  Faster Deployment - SaaS business

Social business intelligence (social BI) intelligence enables rapid
refers to a management technique that deployment without any required
integrates group sharing in order to physical implementation. Indicee
improve existing processes, products and is a good example in this sense.
projects. Social business intelligence is  Greater Mobility - With cloud
managed by the analytical software that business intelligence, people can
combines the functions of traditional access data from anywhere, at
project management software with anytime, on any internet device.
commitment techniques from social media.  Accessible to Business Users -
The most important feature of social Business intelligence is complex
business intelligence is that it requests and managed by IT teams. This
customer input and feedback at early creates bottlenecks and hinders
points in the process rather than after a the decision-makers in other
product is launched. business areas from getting the
“Social media intelligence aims to derive answers they need. Indicee’s
actionable information from social media cloud BI makes it possible for
in the context of rich application settings, data-savvy business users to
develop corresponding decision-making or manage the complete BI process,
decision-aiding frameworks, and provide because of some smart tools for
architectural designs and solution modelling and querying.
frameworks for existing and new Despite the advantages of applying BI
applications.” (Zeng, et al., 2010) solutions in organizations, there are few
alternatives aimed at SMEs. A useful
7. Conclusion alternative for SMEs could be the
Regarding Mobile Business Intelligence, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.
as it was noticed in the specialized studies,
in 2010, people wished to look at the key Reference list:
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reports, and perhaps to some alerts. Wong, S.F., Yeoh, W. (2009). Business
Intelligence Systems: State-of-the-Art Review and
Starting with 2012, they begin to request Contemporary Applications. Symposium on
new features like interaction and Progress in Information & Communication
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Business Intelligence, the following are http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/0
highlighted: 2/19/gartner-predicts-infrastructure-services-will-
 Lower Costs (SaaS BI) - Generally, accelerate-cloud-computing-growth/
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Intelligence: Who is hot in 2014?, 18 February
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“Software-as-a-Service” or cosentino/185846/mobile-business-intelligence-
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High Expectations for Growth of Mobile Business
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included in the service. high-expectations-for-growth-of-mobile-business-
intelligence/

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[5] Gartner (2014), retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2013/10/14/

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IEEE Intelligent Systems, 25(6), pp. 13–16

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Appendix

Table 1
Approaches of Business Intelligence
Approaches Definitions of Business Intelligence Authors
“Business Intelligence (BI) can be defined as the process Golfarelli,
of turning data into information and then into Stefano, Iuris,
knowledge." 2004
Process “Focus on the process of gathering data from internal and Chee, T. et al.,
external sources and of analyzing them in order to 2009
generate relevant information for improved decision
making.”
“Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of Wixom &
technologies, applications, and processes for gathering, Watson, 2010
storing, accessing, and analyzing data to help its users
Technology make better decisions.”
“Focus on the tools and technologies that allow the Chee, T. et al.,
recording, recovery, manipulation and analysis of 2009
information.”
“Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that Gartner, 2014
includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and
best practices that enable access to and analysis of
information to improve and optimize decisions and
Product
performance.”
“Describe BI as the emerging result/product of in-depth Chee, T. et al.,
analysis of detailed business data as well as analysis 2009
practices using BI tools.”

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