Situational business intelligence

Abstract

Traditional business intelligence has focused on creating dimensional models and data warehouses, where after a high modeling and creation cost structurally similar queries are processed on a regular basis. So called "ad-hoc" queries aggregate data from one or several dimensional models, but fail to incorporate other external information that is not considered in the pre-defined data model. We focus on a different kind of business intelligence, which spontaneously correlates data from a company's data warehouse with "external" information sources that may come from the corporate intranet, are acquired from some external vendor, or are derived from the internet. Such situational applications are usually short-lived programs created for a small group of users with a specific business need. We will showcase the state-of-the-art for situational applications as well as the impact of Web 2.0 for these applications. We will also present examples and research challenges that the information management research community needs to address in order to arrive at a platform for Situational Business Intelligence. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.