Business Intelligence for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Business intelligence (BI) has evolved over several years as organizations have extended their online transaction processing (OLTP) capabilities and applications to support their routine operations. With online analytical processing (OLAP), organizations have also established the capability to extract internal and external data from a variety of sources to specifically obtain intelligence about non-routine and often less-structured arrangements. BI therefore refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about the operations of an organization. It has the capability of providing comprehensive insight into the more volatile factors affecting the business and its operations, thereby facilitating enhanced decision-making quality and contributing to the creation of business value. Larger and more sophisticated organizations have long been exploiting these capabilities. Business Intelligence for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) guides SMEs in replicating this experience to provide an agile roadmap toward business sustainability.

The book points out that successful BI implementations have generated significant increases in revenue and cost savings, however, the failure rates are also very high. More importantly, it emphasizes that a full range of BI capabilities is not the exclusive purview of large organizations. It shows how SMEs make extensive use of BI techniques to develop the kind of agility endowing them with the organizational capability to sense and respond to opportunities and threats in an increasingly dynamic business environment. It points to the way to a market environment in which smaller organizations could have a larger role. In particular, the book explains that by establishing the agility to leverage internal and external data and information assets, SMEs can enhance their competitiveness by having a comprehensive understanding of the key to an agile roadmap for business sustainability.

Lila Rao is the deputy executive director and a senior lecturer in Information Systems at the Mona School of Business and Management, The University of the West Indies (UWI). She holds a PhD in Information Systems from The University of the West Indies. She lectures courses in Database Management Systems, Enterprise Data Management and Business Analytics. Her research interests include Business Intelligence, Data Quality. Knowledge Management and Decision Support Systems.

Gunjan Mansingh is head of the Department and a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computing, The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica. She holds a PhD in Information Systems from The University of the West Indies. She lectures courses in Business Intelligence, Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery and Analytics. Her research interests include Business Intelligence, Data Mining, Machine Leaning, Decision Support Systems, Knowledge Management and Expert Systems.

Maurice McNaughton is the director of the Centre of Excellence for IT-enabled Innovation at the Mona School of Business and Management, The University of the West Indies (UWI). He holds a PhD in Decision Sciences from Georgia State University. He lectures courses in Modelling and Decision Support Systems; IT Economics; IT Governance and Strategic use of ICT. His research interest spans the domain of emerging Open ICT ecosystems, and includes Open Source Software, Open/Big Data, Mobile and Cloud Computing.