A case study

Rapidly changing business world and modern informational demands have caused changes in decision-making habits within companies. Decisions-makers should not base their decisions purely on intuition anymore. Today the business environment is changing so rapidly, that decisions need to be supported by explicit information regarding the events happening within the companies and in their economic environment. Thus, efficient and well-timed information is widely identified as being critical part of businesses to not only be successful, but to at least survive in constantly changing business environment. Business Intelligence (BI) systems provide a favorable environment for companies to improve their competitiveness and decision-making. Indeed, these BI solutions are continuing to achieve considerable attention from organizations of all sizes in all business fields. In fact, BI is an umbrella term for applications, platforms and tools that help the data analyzing and identifying data relations and trends. In addition, it includes the methods how business data is gathered, stored, analyzed and eventually how the obtained results are provided for the decision maker. There are various reasons why companies decide to acquire a BI system. They, for example, improve the decision-making, cut costs, increase transparency of data flows and may identify new business opportunities. After all, BI systems are complex entities and therefore difficult to implement. In this thesis, the implementation of a BI tool is studied through a real business case. This study has examined, what kind of issues companies should take into consideration when deploying such systems. According to the theoretical literature and empirical evidence, the most critical success factors in BI system implementations include the support from the upper management, sufficient human resources, proper technical architecture, employee buy-in and end-users’ proper training.The most common challenges of BI projects have also been evaluated in this thesis. According to the literature, the access and use of data has turned out to be problematic in BI implementations. Moreover, the difficult of empowering the end-users to use the systems self-reliantly is widely recognized to be challenging. The biggest challenges in the Case Company relate to data quality and how to get the end-users excited about the tool and understand how it will increase the performance of their daily work. In addition, setting up the data governance and defining user-rights turned out to be challenging with this particular project. In addition, the ability to measure the success derived from using a BI system is evaluated in this thesis. Due to the nature of BI systems it is often challenging to measure the actual benefits in monetary value. Some of the BI’s benefits are highly intangible, meaning that companies need to consider different kinds of alternatives to evaluate the success of their BI