Goal-Oriented BI

The methodology we have developed defines the organizational goals and links these explicitly to a decision model and relevant Key Performance Indicators. The methodology can be used by organizations at any level of maturity and readiness in terms of gathering and monitoring data for BI-based decision making. In particular, unlike many simulation approaches, it does not necessitate up front large quantities of data to be useful. We believe different organizations however have different needs and may be in different states when they decide to incorporate such a methodology. Consequently, we are suggesting an iterative approach for this section.

Furthermore, we extend the existing modelling notation (URN) and its associated evaluation algorithms to allow organizations to better define the relationship between the KPIs and also to aggregate the KPI values using custom formulas.

Finally, we propose an enhancement to the supporting tool (jUCMNav) to enable better integration with Business Intelligence tools. This helps organizations to use their existing BI systems to initialize the KPI values of the defined models. Although this additional tool support can be helpful for organizations that would like to automate this part of the process, it is not a required component of the methodology and a small organization without a sophisticated Business Intelligence infrastructure can still benefit from the approach.

In the next three subsections, we elaborate on the three main contributions of this paper in more detail.