Toward a goal-oriented, business intelligence decision-making framework

Abstract

Decision making is a crucial yet challenging task in enterprise management. In many organizations, decisions are still made based on experience and intuition rather than on facts and rigorous approaches, often because of lack of data, unknown relationships between data and goals, conflicting goals, and poorly understood risks. This paper presents a goal-oriented, iterative conceptual framework for decision making that allows enterprises to begin development of their decision model with limited data, discover required data to build their model, capture stakeholders goals, and model risks and their impact. Such models enable the aggregation of Key Performance Indicators and their integration to goal models that display good cognitive fit. Managers can monitor the impact of decisions on organization goals and improve decision models. The approach is illustrated through a retail business real-life example. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.