José António Porfírio

Business Intelligence as a Service - Strategic Tool for Competitiveness

Today, more than ever, organizations face daily environmental changes. The source of change may be a new regulatory law, competitor, business model, hype in technology, new service trend, or the lack of skilled human resources. In order to understand the factors of change and their impacts on business strategies, organizations need to have in place a set of tools, methods and procedures to allow an instantaneous reaction, and foresee proactively the highest number of variables that will have impact in the organization’s competitive advantages. One of the central tools that managers have at their disposal to face these challenges come from the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which are entering into a new stage. The maturity of some Internet technologies, business intelligence systems and outsourcing business models allows the availability of new services, based on cloud computing. The rise of new service trends are taking place, and if an organization is able of combining the advantages of those trends, it might gain competitive advantage, throughout Business Intelligence as a Service (BIaaS), and what began as a way to achieve operating savings, will eminently reveal its true disruptive potential throughout the Internet.

Business Intelligence Standardization and Corporate Strategy: A Paradox

Market evidence suggests the increased investment of companies in BI systems to feed their strategy processes. The change in the strategy fundamentals increases substantially the value of information for both strategies’ implementation and control. One domain neglected is the use of BI systems for strategy conception. And this is something increasingly important in today’s constantly changing world of business, where new information in a knowledge economy is usually synonymous of more added value and competitiveness. However, together with this tendency, we experience a general trend for BI systems standardization, a dominant movement for BI solutions providers to standardize processes in order to take advantage of learning curves and processes, and economies of scale and scope. Considering that each strategy should be unique, and departing from the principle that BI systems are closely related with corporate strategy, it seems that there is a double paradox in BI markets that companies should solve as soon as possible, in order to take the most out of the momentum of BI markets.