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The IUP Journal of Management Research :

Using Business Intelligence for Competitive Advantage

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This paper aims to study the various aspects of applying Business Intelligence (BI) for gaining competitive advantage. The study is restricted to three areasinnovation spurred by BI, business process management and decisionmaking, personalization and CRM initiatives; and how BI can be useful to the organization by using the suggestions made by earlier studies. This paper thereafter, focuses on how a BI tool should be chosen and the expectations from the tool.

 
 
 

BI is not a new concept and companies have been undertaking various initiatives with regard to data collection and analysis. However, despite the significant investments, companies have been confronted by several challenges that have proved detrimental to the usefulness of BI. These include: inconsistent data, impaired visibility, data redundancy, information overload and delayed delivery of information. In a number of instances, the benefits have not been translated into quantified form or clearly expressed. At times the BI initiatives have not been consistent with those of the organizational aspirations and have resulted in nonconformance with individual roles within the organization. Therefore, for the success of BI, a reasonable degree of groundwork becomes necessary, followed by the development of a common framework. This should be followed by bridging of the existing gaps in the decisionmaking processes and a coherent approach chosen to articulate the value generated through the BI initiatives (Rogers et al., 2005).

A survey conducted in 2002 by the FuldGiladHerring Academy of Competitive Intelligence, revealed that out of the 140 corporate strategists polled, 97 percent accepted that they had no early warning system in place and that in the past five years at least three high impact events had surprised them. For example, in the late 1990s, VISA International was faced with Webbased competition that enabled customers to bypass credit cards using online peer to peer transactions (Fuld, 2003).

 
 
 

Management Research Journal, Business Intelligence, Business Process Management, Data Redundancy, Corporate Strategists, Data Mining, Real Time Data Warehousing, Geographic Information Systems, Data Visualization, OLAP , Online Analytical Processing, Datawarehousing and Datamining, Operational Data Sources, ODS, Business Process Management.