Enterprise modeling for business intelligence

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) software aims to enable business users to easily access and analyze relevant enterprise information so that they can make timely and fact-based decisions. However, despite user-friendly features such as dashboards and other visualizations, business users still find BI software hard to use and inflexible for their needs. Furthermore, current BI initiatives require significant efforts by IT specialists to understand business operations and requirements, in order to build BI applications and help formulate queries. In this paper, we present a vision for BI that is driven by enterprise modeling. The Business Intelligence Model (BIM) aims to enable business users to conceptualize business operations and strategies and performance indicators in a way that can be connected to enterprise data through highly automated tools. The BIM draws upon well-established business practices such as Balanced Scorecard and Strategy Maps as well as requirements and conceptual modeling techniques such as goal modeling. The connection from BIM to databases is supported by a complementary research effort on conceptual data integration. © 2010 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.