Theory and Practice in Business Intelligence

The debate is developed based on the following considerations: 1 - Business Intelligence (BI) is unanimous considered the art of gaining business advantage from data; therefore BI systems and infrastructures must integrate disparate data sources into a single coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis within the extended enterprise; 2 - Business Intelligence can be described as a value proposition that helps organizations in their decision-making processes; 3 – the Business Intelligence Value Chain represents a „From DATA To PROFIT“ approach and is recommended to ground any performance management program. Different aspects, including theoretical considerations and practice examples, regarding location intelligence, mobile BI, cloud-based BI, social BI and collaborative Business Intelligence will be treated, pointing out some of the author’s contributions. Nowadays, organizations have adopted more prudent policies requiring a financial justification for nearly every IT initiative, including Business Intelligence system implementations. A business-driven methodology is recommended in any BI project management approach, project scoping and planning being vital for the project success. A business-driven approach of a BI project implementation starts with a feasibility study. The decision-making process for large projects is very complicated, and will not be subject of this paper. Having in mind a middle-sized BI project, a feasibility study based on the Monte Carlo simulation method will be conducted.