Conceptualizing Business Intelligence Architecture

Given today’s business environment, at times a corporate executive may feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available and the coverage of what is actually known as Business Intelligence (BI) architecture. There are literally hundreds of product offerings to choose from. For example, a simple Google search for “business intelligence software” yields more than 24 million responses including more than 50 different vendors. Shariat and Nwakanma (2006) strongly recommend that customers view the future as involving collaboration and cooperation between all parties within the business as well as the external vendors in order to properly manage enterprise information technology systems. This manuscript defines business intelligence, explores the basic difficulty in managing a firm’s business intelligence architecture, and offers a comprehensive BI framework to aid an executive with appreciating the complete enterprise view. This is in total contrast to today’s vendor “BI dashboard” view that appears to be easy to design, quick to implement, and simple to