Taking advantage of business intelligence in a complex-systems environment

Abstract

Business intelligence (BI) has fundamentally changed how many companies conduct their business. In literature, focus has been on volume-operation companies that provide services to millions of customers. In contrast, complex-systems companies have fewer customers and pursue customer needs by providing more customized products and services. This paper presents the results at a case of a complex-systems company with the overall aim to see how a complex-systems company has taken advantage of BI. In addition, a framework was used to measure the BI maturity of the company. Literature also emphasis that complex-system companies may benefit from adopting BI applications from volume-operations companies, but the results indicate that there may be a difference in the importance of BI tools, which in turn may negatively influence such cross-category adoptions. © 2014 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.