Implementing a Business Intelligence System for small and medium-sized enterprises

Over the years, Business Intelligence (BI) systems have become critically important to organizations due to the increasing fast-paced competition, the vast amount of daily generated data and the complexity of how to manage collected data. Business intelligence systems empower organizations to gain insights and to understand a clearer view of their vast data, business and customers, which help to make better decisions and hence produce better results and increase profit. BI refers to a collection of an organization’s resources such as tools, technologies, applications, systems and databases which enable organizations to manage insights of their business data, activities and performance in order to make better decision. However the majority of existing BI systems, target and support large organizations, and the small and medium-sized organizations (SMEs) are mostly overlooked due to lack of substantial finance. The paper elaborates the considerations for implementing BI systems for SMEs. Some new trends such as cloud BI solutions, open BI sources solutions are reviewed. The paper finally provides for the implementation of Business Intelligence system for a SME, the purpose and constraints of the system are detailed