The Effects of using Business Intelligence Systems

Results and Conclusions

The purpose of this paper was to give an insight into the current trend topic Business Intelligence in start-up companies. Business Intelligence is a relevant tool for successful management as well as start-ups. The BI systems convert the ever-increasing amounts of data of the individual operative systems into usable information. The BI tools for analysis and evaluation of the central database support the daily work of the executives and provide the basis for strategic decisions. Furthermore, the results of BI also serve the current company analysis. This can streamline business processes, improve customer and partner relationships, reduce costs, minimize risks, shorten processes, and gain competitive advantage.

Start-ups need to consider a wide variety of technical requirements and technical issues to successfully implement BI. Evaluations are becoming ever more extensive and contain a wide complexity of information about the company. A business model can be used to structure and efficiently develop a company-wide BI strategy. Also, developing a suitable BI strategy is the key to successful, long-term BI projects in start-up companies.

The market for business intelligence has evolved steadily in recent years and is also heavily dominated by the most important and well-known providers such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, SAS, Microsoft, and OpenSource. These companies offer software for start-ups that can successfully handle the five tasks of business intelligence, i.e., the collection, integration, storage, processing, and presentation of data. Also, the overall BI market is divided into the segments BI user tools (BI front ends) and BI data management (BI backend). BI front-ends include OLAP and multidimensional databases, data mining, dashboards, balanced scorecards, planning, reporting, and consolidation. The BI backend comprises software for data integration, data quality management, master data management, as well as relational or analytical databases in BI systems. In principle, many projects in the front-end area were initiated in start-ups, while investments in the back-end infrastructure are still reserved.

A rough market investigation shows that start-up companies like to buy open sources software vendors such as Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Jedox Palo, and SpagoBI. Because they can negotiate on an equal footing, have a local presence and support benefits, as well as know-how for specific tasks or industries. Another advantage of open source providers is that they offer a free version as well as a commercial version of their software. However, their commercial version can often be purchased cheaper than that of the mostly providers. The difference between the free version and the paid version is in most cases in advanced features and professional support.

The most frequently mentioned problems with BI use in start-ups are the lack of data quality and the lack of data integration from the previous systems. The lack of data integration shows that the start-up companies are not aiming for new isolated solutions with BI, but rather clear, company-wide BI solutions. The differences between start-ups and larger companies in the missing requirements from specialist departments are also obvious. There is, therefore, a need to catch up in start-ups in the preparation and the Matching Content Requirements Profiles for BI Solutions. Furthermore, to secure data quality in start-ups, the introduction of suitable auxiliary instruments, e.g., To recommend reconciliation reports, account assignment and master data validations to be able to carry out better plausibility checks and quality checks about the data. Also, software for verifying data quality is already being offered, using validation and transformation techniques such as parsing (syntax analysis).

It is anticipated that the adoption of BI solutions at start-up companies will continue to increase in the future, and thus more references from users will be available. As a result, BI applications will become more important and play an even more grave role in start-ups, as the demands continue to increase. The trend is towards ever faster and more detailed results, to be able to respond quickly to changes or to act better by prognoses in less time. Simple office applications, which are still used in many start-ups today, will no longer suffice as business intelligence solutions in the future. Especially very hard economic phases can survive companies with a professional Business Intelligence solution better than the companies, in which such a solution is not implemented. For start-ups, there are suitable professional solutions in the open source area.