From business intelligence insights to actions: A methodology for closing the sense-and-respond loop in the adaptive enterprise

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics play a critical role in modern businesses by assisting them to gain insights about internal operations and the external environment and to make timely data-driven decisions. Actions resulting from these insights often require changes to various parts of the enterprise. A significant challenge in these contexts is to systematically connect and coordinate the BI-driven insights with consequent enterprise decisions and actions. This paper proposes a methodology for closing the gap between what an enterprise senses from BI-driven insights and its response actions and changes. This methodology adopts and synthesizes existing modeling frameworks, mainly i* and the Business Intelligence Model (BIM), to provide a coherent step-by-step way of connecting the sensed signals of the enterprise to subsequent responses, and hence to make BI and analytics more actionable and understandable. Applicability of the proposed methodology is illustrated in a case scenario. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.