1. INTRODUCTION
Information has always been crucial for running a successful business in all sectors
of the economy, education, science,
healthcare, state administration and other business areas. Modern organizations express
the need for an effective business
information system, which will enable the collection, preservation, processing and
finding information when needed. An important
characteristic of the modern world is the confrontation with many uncertainties and
rapid changes. The complex business
environment complicates doing a business activity and adaptability in various business
organizations. Therefore, business
managers are forced to look for instruments and mechanisms which will facilitate management
and create good conditions for
business success. Business intelligence (BI) certainly belongs among such mechanisms.
According to Rouse
(http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/), BI is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable
information to help corporate executives, business managers, and other end users make
more informed and high-quality business
decisions. Also, Rouse (http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/) states that BI encompasses a variety of tools,
applications, and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal
systems and external sources,
prepare it for analysis, develop and have queries about the data, and create reports,
dashboards and data visualizations
to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational
workers. Since its development,
the concept of BI is strongly imprinted in economies around the world. The purpose
of BI systems is to help business managers
to adapt and implement business decisions. Nowadays, without the implementation of
BI systems business is unthinkable. Today's
BI systems combine a broad set of data analysis applications, methodologies, technologies,
and platforms for data storage
(Data Warehousing), data mining (Data Mining), OLAM (On-line Analytical Mining) and
data processing (On-Line Analytical
Processing - OLAP). BI systems also include an ad-hoc analysis, enterprise reporting,
real-time BI, open source BI, mobile BI,
operational BI, collaborative BI, cloud BI, data visualization software, tools for
building BI dashboards and other intelligence
tools that will support some aspects of top management decision-making. The remaining
sections in the first chapter describe
the term of BI systems and their structure. The second chapter describes early development
of BI systems, the third chapter
describes its state today, and the fourth chapter gives an overview and analysis of
previous research in the field. The fifth
chapter gives some predictions for the future and the last chapter offers the conclusion.
1.1 The term of business intelligence systems
Information is the basic content that BI systems use to communicate with other entities
within the organization. As stated by
Javorović and Bilandžić (2007), BI system is a system that uses appropriate methods based
on data collection from open and
public sources and has the purpose to detect and determine the legalities that would
facilitate decision-making. A BI system
provides answers for various business questions, like what is happening in the business
environment, why that is happening,
what needs to be done, how to do something and what will happen next. According to
Panian and
Klepac (2003), the answers to
those questions represent the core functions of BI. The core functions of BI are observation,
understanding, reaction,
anticipation and reorganization. BI systems process, store and provide useful information
to users who need them. A BI system
is an information system that employs BI tools to produce and deliver information
to users. According to
(Obeidat et al., 2015),
BI transforms the raw and massive data collected from various sources into useful
information. Business conditions in the world
today prove that the implementation of a BI system is a means of achieving success
in the business environment. According to
Olszak and Zurada (2015) and Chen et al. (2012),
BI enables organizations to make more informed, intelligent business decisions
as well as to adapt to a changeable environment and to survive in the business world,
while cooperating with customers,
suppliers and competitors. Modern BI involves the integration of intelligence methodologies
and information technology that are
applied to the business world. According to Bilandžić et al. (2012), in the economies
worldwide BI is an institutionalized and
separate business function to a large extent- it ranges from 73% to 96% in the European
Union, and 87% at the global level. BI
involves cyclic processes in which business data and information, collected by different
techniques and tools are transformed
into knowledge. Based on that knowledge, business managers make business decisions.
The cyclic process is made up of various
interconnected phases and each next phase can begin only when the previous phase is
over. The cycle begins with management and
planning (setting goals), followed by the collection of data that should be analyzed
and ends with the distribution of the
results of an analysis. Figure 1 shows the BI-cycle. It should be noted that the BI-cycle does not end with distribution
(final phase), but it continues (there is never the final answer in business).
1.2 The structure of business intelligence systems
A structure model of a BI system consists of information that reveals new knowledge,
analysis and segmentation of information,
personalization (where information is gaining in importance only if it is directed
to the right user), delivery through multiple
channels (wherein the process of serving customers with information all information
solutions must be used), and action,
interaction and transaction (where information is used in modelling of the conception
of company development). In order to work
properly, BI system must retrieve external and internal data that are collected in
data warehouses. The interconnected data
stores grow into a data warehouse. In terms of technology, BI systems consist of data
marts, ETL processes, expert systems,
OLAP tools and solutions based on fuzzy logic. A BI system consists of four basic
components - infrastructure, functionality,
organization, and business. Figure 2 shows a general BI system schema.
1.3 Advantages and disadvantages of business intelligence systems
We can emphasize some of the main advantages of BI systems: a) facilitation of the
decision-making process, b) the unique
structure of reporting enables faster and more efficient decision-making and contributes
to the improvement of business
processes, c) conducting a data analysis, it is possible to use collected data in
the best way and increase the satisfaction
of all users, d) providing users only with the information they need and timely expressed
information that leads to better
communication and e) providing opportunities to increase the value of information
as a resource. However, some disadvantages
can also be found: a) the high cost of implementation of BI systems, b) in order to
obtain useful results, it takes a long
period of time to do a data analysis, c) expensive and long training in their use
and d) lack of adequate professional employees
that can work in a BI environment in individual companies.
2. THE HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
The concept of BI has been practiced for thousands of years in different domains of
social and economic life. According to
Nadrljanski (2013), historical precursors of BI are military intelligence, protection of
national security and protection of
internal security. The first users of strategic knowledge were rulers, commanders
and bankers, while today's modern BI users
are business managers. The rapid development of BI systems begins with the automatization
of business processes of individual
companies with reference to their implementation of various transactional systems,
which have proven to be generators of large
amounts of data. That has lead to a huge explosion of data. New databases were created,
but it was not easy to access them, so
the data were not used in large quantities. Analogous to that, implementation of information
systems in business that was
focused on processing transactions was directed to the monitoring of production and
sales, on employee records and processing
of their salaries, etc. Over the years, those systems have evolved and started to
serve the owners and managers of companies in
support of making business decisions.
As a term, business intelligence was mentioned in 1958 by the IBM computer scientist
Hans Peter Luhn. According to Heinze
(https://www.betterbuys.com/), in his article titled "A Business Intelligence
System", he described the BI system as an
automatic system developed to disseminate information to various sections of any industrial,
scientific, or government
organization. Today, he is considered the father of BI. In 1989, Howard Dresner, the
analyst of the American consulting
firm Gartner Group Inc. of Stanford, brought the phrase "business intelligence" in the vernacular. Further
development in
the field of BI has led to the development of the data warehouse that improves the
flow of information. Heinze
(https://www.betterbuys.com/) claims that data warehousing drastically reduced
the time it took to access data. The data
that had been stored traditionally in multiple places were now all in a single location.
In the 1990s, came the development
of supplemental facets of data warehousing such as ETL tools and OLAP software. That
phase of development became known as BI
1.0. Also, Heinze (https://www.betterbuys.com/) states that BI has
become a familiarconcept in the late 1990s and early 2000s when dozens of new vendors
hit the market. According to Heinze
(https://www.betterbuys.com/), during that period, there were
two basic functions of BI - producing data and reports, and organizing and visualizing
it in a presentable way. However, two
significant issues remained, holding back the development of the technology - complexity
and time. As stated by Heinze
(https://www.betterbuys.com/), the projects were owned by the IT department, meaning
that most users were still not capable
of executing BI tasks on their own. The existing BI tools had been developed only
for professionals. For their use, extensive
training in analytics was required. It took more time to deliver and formulate reports
to all decision makers. Only experts
were able to use advanced data analysis software. The beginning of the 21st century
marked a milestone in the development of
BI systems with the development of technology for solving complexity and speed problems,
with which began phase BI 2.0. There
was the occurrence of cloud-based programs that simplified and expanded the reach
of BI platforms. According to Heinze (https://www.betterbuys.com/), BI 2.0 provided a
host of different technologies such as real-time processing, which incorporated
data from events as they happened into data warehouses, allowing companies to make
decisions based on the most recent
information available. Some other technologies provided self-service access for non-expert
users. All employees could now
complete their tasks and projects without interference from the IT department. The
exponential growth of the Internet enabled
and supported such technologies. According to Heinze (https://www.betterbuys.com/), it also provided a way
for users to review
methods and software, and more broadly disseminate a basic understanding of the different
uses of BI. By 2005, the increasing
interconnectivity of the business world meant that business firms and business managers
needed real-time information, in order
to deal with the competition on the market, and understand what their consumers wanted
and what they thought of their business
firm. With that, BI systems are becoming essential for business firms that want to
stay competitive in an entirely new,
data-driven environment.
3. TODAY'S STATE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
Today's numerous possibilities of BI systems were deeply impacted by the development
of personal computers. Development of IT
caused migration of BI to the Internet and development of web applications that allow
usage of BI, which are also available on
mobile devices. According to Watson (http://www.business2community.com/), BI has entered
its third generation and can be
accessed from multiple devices. It is extremely user-friendly and collaborative. Growth
in the development of special software
has significantly contributed to the development of BI. BI systems are being developed
into software packages that are
compatible with knowledge bases and methods of artificial intelligence that are enabling
simulation of decision-making in
business. Companies evolve from information management to BI management companies,
which are based on new software solutions,
knowledge bases and expert systems that are helping in generating decisions that are
most likely to be successful in future
business. Methodologies, technologies and platforms for storing data, data mining
and processing data are combined. BI systems
are used in fields of electronic marketing, electronic trading, electronic banking,
stock exchange, reservation systems and
other fields. Companies like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft provide users with databases
that are the basis for building a data
store. They also offer tools necessary for the usage of BI systems. Besides the companies
mentioned above, there are a few
more important providers like SAS, Cognos, Business Objects and Micro Strategy that
provide their users with tools necessary
for the usage of platforms for BI systems. With the appearance of big amounts of data,
a new business intelligence in "Cloud"
(Cloud BI) and mobile business intelligence that enables their users to use BI on
mobile devices have appeared. Their emergence
enabled companies to optimize IT, which made them more competitive and productive
in their business. Also, BI in the cloud
provides the possibility of on-demand self-service, wide network access, elasticity,
merging, and accessibility as well as
performance measurement and use of service. According to (Alexe et al., 2014), Kwapien (http://www.datapine.com/) and Kiger
(http://www.business2community.com/) today’s trends of BI are mobile device diversity
and management, mobile apps and
applications, the Internet of Everything, hybrid cloud and IT as a service broker,
cloud/client architecture, the era of
personal cloud, 3-D printing, smart machines, web-scale IT, Software-Defined Anything
(SDx), Big data, customer experience,
innovations in marketing, sales + content marketing, workplace flexibility, predictive
and prescriptive analytics, visual data
discovery, innovative data virtualization, graph databases and graph analytics, data
storytelling and data journalism, cloud
analytics, democratization of data product chain, bootstrapping, etc.
4. RESEARCH IN THE FIELD OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
Research conducted in the field of BI is present in the world for years. One of the
most important studies in the field of BI
was conducted by Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management in 2004. The results
of the research were published by Susan Myburgh on the platform Academia.edu (https://www.academia.edu/) in 2004.
In that research, authors were exploring the genesis
of BI in certain countries (Canada, Finland, Israel, Africa and the UK). According
to
Javorović and Bilandžić (2007), results
of the research conducted in 2000 show that around 90% of problems in forming BI systems
are caused by a human factor. Also,
Bilandžić et al. (2012) state that research on a global level was conducted in 2005 by
Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA) –
an international professional organization with headquarters in Finland. As stated
by
Bilandžić et al. (2012), results of the
research comprised terms that became representative when talking about BI in the economy.
The research was conducted in 18
countries around the world on a sample of 287 companies. It has shown that BI has
been applied to 73% of companies in Norway,
76% in the Netherlands, 79% in Canada, 89% in Mexico and Asian territory, 97% in Brazil
and Switzerland, 95% in Finland to 96%
in Germany and on a global level 87% of companies have applied BI. According to
Javorović and Bilandžić (2007), one of the
studies in the field of BI was conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in 2004. The results gained by this American
scientific institution show that a certain application of BI increases the efficiency
of decision-making that decreases the
risk of making bad judgments and wrong decisions. Also, according to
Javorović and Bilandžić (2007), research conducted in
2002 by the European Union shows that 82% of companies whose annual revenues are higher
than 10 million dollars have special
departments for BI systems. Certain authors researched elements and influence of e-business
on business activities of companies
as well as how BI enables converting data into information and knowledge which can
then be used as a base for quality
decision-making. According to Bilandžić et al. (2012), in the Croatian economy one of
the most important studies was conducted
in 2005 by Mislav Jurišić and Darko Ivančević on a sample of 85 companies using online
surveys. The surveys were completed
only by 23 companies. Bilandžić et al. (2012) state that the results of the research
showed that 9% of the companies have a
separate department for BI (only 2 companies), whereas 44% implement BI into their
usual business activities. On the other
hand, 47% of companies did not consider using BI. Research on the application of BI
was conducted by Ognjen Zebić in 2010 as
a part of his postgraduate studies thesis at the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb. According
to
Zebić (2010), the research was
conducted using a survey on a sample of 84 companies. The survey was completed only
by half of the companies. According to
the results of this research, 50% of Croatian companies in 2010 had a separate department
for BI which was in charge of
gathering and analyzing business information. In 2011, research was conducted on the
application of BI in the Croatian economy
and the results of this research were published in Bilandžić et al. (2012).
The results indicate that most of the companies
(57%) apply some activities of BI, 19% have the department for BI and 24% do not apply
any kind of BI activity. Present
research in the field of BI shows that its application in companies is a matter of
rational choice and it also offers an
array of benefits and improvements to the business. Today, BI is developing in the
field of industry, education, energy and
utilities, government, healthcare, media, manufacturing, banking and investment services,
insurance, retail, security and
risk management, sales, mobile BI, business process, etc. According to
Terry (http://www.informationweek.com/)
and Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/),an IDC Health Insights survey of
40 hospitals and 30 insurers showed that the goals of
top hospitals in healthcare are identifying at-risk patients (66%), tracking clinical outcomes
(64%), performance measurement
and management (64%) and clinical decision-making at the point of care (57%). According to
Ivan and Velicanu (2015), a
Real-Time Healthcare Analytics Solution for Preventive Medicine, developed by SAP,
is one of the best solutions in the
present healthcare industry. The main benefit of this solution is saving time in healthcare
analytics and can be easily
customized for any medical case. Also, Marr
(http://www.forbes.com/) claims that the recently formed partnership Pittsburgh
Health Data Alliance aims to take data from various sources (such as medical and insurance
records, wearable sensors, genetic
data and even social media use) to create a comprehensive image of the patient as
an individual, in order to offer a tailored
healthcare package. This project will try to solve the biggest problem in the quest
for data-driven healthcare - the huge amount
of data in the medical industry that are often stored in archives controlled by different
doctors’ surgeries, hospitals, clinics
and administrative departments. In addition, Marr
(http://www.forbes.com/) says that Apple and IBM are collaborating on a big
data health platform that will allow iPhone and Apple Watch users to share data to
IBM’s Watson Health cloud healthcare
analytics service. As stated by Marr
(http://www.forbes.com/), the main goal of that collaboration is to discover new medical
insights into crunching real-time activities and biometric data from millions of potential
users. Besides, Marr
(http://www.forbes.com/) explains that BI and Big Data are helping in the fight against the spread of epidemics.
For example,
in Africa, mobile phone location data is proving in efforts to track population movements,
which helps predict the spread of the
Ebola virus and provide treatment centers for sick people. Also, researchers are beginning
to use Big Data to find a cure for
cancer. According to Marr
(http://www.forbes.com/), the American Society for Clinical Oncology’s CancerLinQ initiative aims to
collate data from every cancer patient in the US and make it available for analysis
in the hope that it will reveal patterns
that lead to new insights.
5. THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
In the future, we believe companies will be forced to rely on BI systems completely
to keep up with the competition that is
increasing on a daily basis. As claimed by Gabelica
(http://imef.me/), we are aware of changes that are the result of improved
IT and Cloud computing in business through the Internet, which are improving possibilities
and are generating more and more
data for companies. According to (Rafeeq et al., 2015), by having access to BI solutions
that allow true self-service, in 2015
users will move from consuming data passively to using them actively to glean important
information. Also, Gabelica
(http://imef.me/) claims that big corporations and small companies will make large amounts of money
purely on selling data
in the future. There are already numerous web pages available where the user can buy
data, which can produce information that
will make their business decision-making easier through analysis. According to Radošević
(http://www.tportal.hr/), mobility
will become the first precondition for quality business because new conditions of
business demand availability 24 hours a day,
from both employees and the data they are managing. Availability of all data is ensured
by Cloud business and this amount of
data creates a new trend, "Big data". According to Ienco
(http://dataconomy.com/), Big data is one of the main leaders of the
trend towards accessing analytics and BI through the Cloud. In addition, Radošević
(http://www.tportal.hr/) states that social
networks prove to be a platform for new business contacts and deals. According to
(http://www.banka.hr/), experts from the A.T.
Kearney company predict that global spending on software, hardware, and services connected
to Big Data will grow on average 30%
each year and that the total value of the market will reach 114 billion dollars. Also,
Dokonal
(http://www.banka.hr/) states
that Big Data technology market will rise up to 50.1 billion dollars in 2015 while
International Data Corporation estimates
that revenues on this market will rise up to 23.76 billion dollars in 2016. According
to Dokonal
(http://www.banka.hr/), the
European commission expects that 100 000 new workplaces will open in Big Data business.
In addition, in the new program of the
European Union for research and innovations, Horizon 2020, projects related to Big
Data will be financed with half a billion
euros. Also, more and more data is being generated by the appearance of the Internet
of Things, which currently includes more
than 10 billion connected devices and significant growth is expected in the next few
years. According to Frinčić
(http://www.progressive.com.hr/), the appearance of the Internet of Things will cause a revolution in optimization
and
rationalization of business processes as well as in familiarization with buyers. According
to Frinčić
(http://www.progressive.com.hr/), it is expected that the number of connected devices in the world will increase
up to
26 billion until 2020. According to Bitner
(http://www.kdnuggets.com/), time for the implementation of software and training
will have to be shorter because of fast changes on the market that demand quick decision-making.
Software will become flexible
which means that there will be the necessity for adjustments according to business
requirements, to grow with business as well
as offer their users the possibility of changing their queries and sources of data
in real time. BI systems will become
simplified, specialized and personalized. We believe that solutions in the Cloud,
intelligent applications, and software, as
well as mobile devices, are the future, but they are already present in today’s BI
systems. In our opinion by investing in BI
systems, companies will contribute to a safer development of business. Using Big Data
technology in the future will surely
contribute to the appearance of new possibilities in fields of education, medicine,
economy, marketing, management, scientific
research and other.
6. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented an overview of business intelligence, its early development
as well as its state today and some
predictions for the future. Implementation of BI systems is a never-ending project.
As competition becomes more aggressive,
the environment and the future more unpredictable, systems of analysis are faced with
demands that are more complex. In the
time of industrial revolution, human knowledge was adapting to the work of machines,
existing processes, and products. The role
of knowledge was to increase the productivity of human work. In today's market, supply
is much higher than demand, which means
that a competitive advantage is not affected by a number of products but their quality.
This causes the evolution of the economy
from industrial to the economy of knowledge and its integration with IT. In a modern
economy, knowledge has become the most
important business resource and modern business becomes dependent on a concept of
BI as a process of gathering significant
external and internal data and their conversion into useful information for business
decision-making. Tools of BI systems are
adapting to every business subject and their needs. Business intelligence as a discipline
comprises of strategic elements,
management accounting, business analysis, marketing and IT. Companies that apply concepts
of BI in their business activities
are establishing better control over information, are making quality decisions and
through that they are creating a competitive
advantage and new forms of revenue. In the future, we believe BI systems will be present
in all companies and their activities.
The appearance of an improved information business system in Cloud will provide companies
with better and safer possibilities in
business. We believe mobility will become the first precondition for quality business
activities. The global market with an
active Big Data trend will experience quick and steady growth. It is expected that
the business segment in Big Data trend will
open 100 000 new workplaces, which comes as a big motivational factor for young people
while searching a job in the future. The
Internet of Things will cause a revolution in optimization and rationalization of
business processes. The time of software
implementation and training will become shorter because of fast changes in marketing.
Solutions in the Cloud, intelligent
applications, software and mobile devices will become the future of BI systems. Implementation
of BI systems into companies
will ensure more quality and safer development of business. Today's BI systems are
still in the phase of development and we do
not have a particular clue how exactly our future will be like. Many questions considering
business intelligence still need to
be answered. We believe that we will find those answers in years to come due to further
development. Finally, we should prepare
for the near future, which will start a new age of BI systems as an unavoidable part
in all business aspects.