Business intelligence modeling in action: a hospital case study

Business Intelligence (BI) projects are long and painful endeavors that employ a variety of design methodologies, inspired mostly by software engineering and project management lifecycle models. In recent BI research, new design methodologies are emerging founded on conceptual business models that capture business objectives, strategies, and more. Their claim is that they facilitate the description of the problem-at-hand, its analysis towards a solution, and the implementation of that solution. The key question explored in this work is:Are such models actually useful to BI design practitioners? To answer this question, we conducted an in situ empirical evaluation based on an on-going BI project for a Toronto hospital. The lessons learned from the study include: confirmation that the BI implementation is well-supported by models founded on business concepts; evidence that these models enhance communication within the project team and business stakeholders; and, evidence that there is a need for business modeling to capture BI requirements and, from those, derive and implement BI designs.