PROCESS MODELS OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Rapid and through understanding of business activities becomes crucial as changes in an increasingly dynamic business environment. Because of this, there is a growing need for timely, pertinent business information. Up-to-date information is thus an organization's strategic resource and the basis for competitiveness in an ever-changing business environment. Therefore, business information should also be managed. Information management consists of identifying what information is needed, how it should be gathered, how it should be organized, where it should be stored, and who should have access to it in an organization. The goal of information management is to maximize the usefulness of an organization's information resources and thereby their value in business decisions. There is no generally accepted definition for business intelligence (BI). Actually, business intelligence seems to be a multifaceted term. The term can refer to processes, techniques or tools to support the making of faster and better decisions. By utilization of business intelligence, an organization learns to anticipate the actions of their customers and competitors as well as different phenomena and trends in their market-areas and fields of activity. A business intelligence process is a significant tool in business information management. The business intelligence process concept is understood as a continuous and systematic process by which an organization acquires, analyses, and disseminates relevant business information to business activities. Briefly, it is a process by which raw information is turned into usable knowledge and intelligence. In this context, the term intelligence can be defined as a collection of information pieces that have been filtered, analyzed, and turned into knowledge, understanding, and deeper insights. Thus, intelligence is value-added information that can be acted upon. An effective business intelligence process aims to increase the quality of strategic and operative planning and to reduce the time used for decision-making. In the literature, several business intelligence process models have been presented. However, it is unclear how and for what purposes different process models are intended to be used. There is only a limited amount of comparison between business intelligence process models. The objective of the paper is to describe and analyze different business intelligence process models. The paper is based on a literature study.