Goal-Oriented BI

Background

The motivation for this research stems from the observation that, despite the vast amount of time and effort spent on Business Intelligence (BI) technologies in organizations, these systems often fail to influence managerial decision making. One of the issues is that BI can be viewed primarily as tool for data consolidation, not necessarily one that represents the managerial decision making environment. As a result, the decision making environment, which includes for example, organizational goals, key performance indicators related to these goals and linkages to the business processes involved, is not represented within the BI system.

Yet, a stream of literature, beginning in the 1960s, has addressed the notion of decision-centric information delivery. The recent development of goal modelling languages provides an opportunity to explore this notion in more detail. More specifically, we believe that the use of such languages can enable integration of organizational goals, managerial decision models, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and the relationship between KPIs and business processes into a single methodology with proper tool support to better deliver information to managers within a decision-centric context.

The main research question therefore, is whether the integration of goal, KPI, and business process models together with BI systems is feasible and potentially beneficial for decision making, especially for middle-level managers and in the presence of sparse data. Accordingly, the main objectives of the research were:

To develop a framework to model goals, key performance indicators and processes, using one modelling notation, in an iterative and incremental manner;

To define a method for modelling and analysis of cause-effect relationships between indicators used to measure goal satisfaction; and

To specific a technical architecture for integration of an existing open source modelling tool with the BI system as a means of implementing the aforementioned framework.