A Five-Layered Business Intelligence Architecture

Many organizations today have adopted business intelligence (BI) as a catalyst to meet specific business needs and to improve organizational effectiveness. Although BI has become more robust and pervasive, some organizations are still unable to maximize the return on their BI investments. One contributing reason is the lack of a good guiding BI architecture to support the implementation of such a system. Having a solid architecture can help organizations to better control the implementation process as well as the operation of the entire BI environment. A review of the existing literature shows that although the importance of a good BI architecture is nonarguable, research in this area is still lacking. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a framework of BI architecture which consists of five layers: data source, ETL, data warehouse, end user, and metadata layers. These five layers are essential to ensure high data quality and smooth information flow in a BI system.