Investigating business intelligence (BI) maturity in an African developing country: A mozambican study

Abstract

The term ‘Big Data’ has placed renewed focus on the untapped value of data in organizations. Despite the hype of Big Data and the obvious benefits associated with it, organizations often battle with dealing with ‘normal’ transactional data, obtained from various information systems to make vital business decisions. The objective of this qualitative study was to investigate the extent to which Business Intelligence System (BIS) were implemented in a developing country such as Mozambique through the lens of organizational maturity. Maturity assessment is a popular method for assessing the readiness of organizations by means of processes, people and data toward the adoption of a particular approach. In this instance, the Business Intelligence maturity model (biMM) developed by Dinter [1] was adopted to establish the BI maturity in the Mozambican organizations for the purpose of comparing results. The study found that high maturity levels were achieved in the integration between technological production and development infrastructure and the availability of BIS in organizations; however, huge challenges were faced in the area of metadata management, master data management, low level access, and support of analytical information to operational business processes. The findings make an important contribution towards understanding the BIS maturity level of Mozambican organizations for the purpose of future data related technological adoptions.