Business Intelligence Outsourcing - A Framework

The purposeful application of selective outsourcing has become a core building block of IT Governance approaches. It seems compelling to apply outsourcing rationales for activities related to integrated management support infrastructures – Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructures –, which have grown in scale, scope and relevance in the recent years. Results from an exploratory study back this conclusion, but they also show that the related activities have to be handled with extraordinary care due to the vital importance of the affected data and the heterogeneity of the affected tasks. Based on these results a framework is derived that supports the identification and evaluation of BI outsourcing opportunities. Usage and benefits of the framework are demonstrated and discussed for five different scenarios.