Direction in Business Intelligence: An Analysis of Applications

Business intelligence (BI) is a growing area of applications that go beyond the reporting and analysis available with transaction processing systems, which are more frequently being implemented with enterprise software. The BI space shares many of the same objectives as previously examined decision support systems (DSS). A number of DSS frameworks were formulated that describe their characteristics and may apply in the BI applications space. DSS frameworks are examined to formulate a set of characteristics that are useful with BI case-based applications. The research supports the framework characteristics. However, the results indicate that the source, time horizon, and currency of information do not have a strong relationship to decision category, whereas the range of users, operational efficiency, duration of use, and need for rapid development are distinguishing characteristics. Prototyping is supported as the only development methodology exploited in creating BI applications. Additional research should be conducted regarding other BI applications and DSS frameworks.