A conceptual framework for delivering cost effective business intelligence solutions as a service

  • Authors:

  • G. M. Muriithi;J. E. Kotzé

  • Affiliations:

  • Central University of Technology, South Africa;University of the Free State, South Africa

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Smart use of business intelligence (BI) can allow organizations to leverage the huge amounts of transactional data at their disposal and turn it into a powerful decision support mechanism that gives them competitive advantage. Despite the potential benefits of an effective BI system, the adoption and use of BI systems within the enterprise remains low, especially among smaller companies with resource constraints. This can partly be explained by the predominant deployment approach available today in which a firm needs to procure, install, configure and operate a BI system in-house. Barriers of high cost, complexity and lack of in-house expertise discourage many firms from adopting BI systems. This paper argues that adopting a cloud computing model, where BI is offered as a service over the Internet can lower these barriers and accelerate the pace of BI adoption. However, migrating BI systems from traditional on-premise environments to the cloud presents huge challenges. There are technical, economic, organizational and regulatory hurdles to overcome. Further, BI systems are multi-component (ETL, Data warehouse, data marts, OLAP, reporting, data mining etc.) and deciding which component(s) to move to the cloud, and which ones to leave on-premise needs careful consideration. In addition, the fact that cloud computing is still in its infancy means there is a general lack of conceptual and architectural frameworks to guide companies considering migrating enterprise systems to the cloud. This paper takes a closer look into traditional BI and proposes a conceptual framework that companies can use to chart an adoption path for cloud BI. The framework combines attributes of IT outsourcing, traditional BI, cloud computing as well as decision theory to present a consolidated view of cloud BI. The domain of South African Higher Education was chosen as the target in which the framework will be tested.