Background: Business intelligence (BI) has become an important part of the solution to providing businesses with the vital decision-making information they need to ensure sustainability and to build shareholder value. Critical success factors (CSFs) provide insight into those factors that organisations need to address to improve new BI projects’ chances of success. Objectives: This research aimed to determine which CSFs are the most important in the financial services sector of South Africa. Method: The authors used a Delphi-technique approach with key project stakeholders in three BI projects in different business units of a leading South African financial services group. Results: Authors regarded CSF categories of ‘committed management support and champion’,‘business vision’, ‘user involvement’ and ‘data quality’ as the most critical for BI success. Conclusions: Researchers in the BI field should note that the ranking of CSFs in this study only correlate partially with those a European study uncovered. However, the five factors the authors postulated in their theoretical framework ranked in the seven highest CSFs. Therefore, they provide a very strong validation of the framework. Research in other industries and other emerging economies may discover similar differences and partial similarities. Of special interest would be the degree of correlation between this study and future, and similar emerging market studies. Practitioners, especially BI project managers, would do well to check that they address the CSFs the authors uncovered before undertaking BI projects.

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Critical success factors for business intelligence in the South African financial services sector : original research

School of Economics and Management

Business intelligence (BI) plays a critical role in providing actionable intelligence to enable good business decision-making. International research shows clear evidence of the benefi ts of implementing sound BI practices. However, within a South African business context, an understanding of the practice, impact and benefi ts of BI is only partly addressed by existing research. Consequently, this article presents the most salient fi ndings of a recent BI study, which was one of the few such studies that have been conducted in South Africa in the 21st century. Although the discussion refl ects fairly high general satisfaction levels with BI among South African businesses, some problems related especially to external BI dimensions are highlighted. An equally important and major concern raised by the article is the apparent lack of companies capitalising on BI opportunities and coordinating BI functions eff ectively. Of concern at the general management level, in particular, are the low satisfaction levels with BI quality, as well as various aspects of BI collection, analysis and dissemination. Despite the fact that businesses use BI functions and planning support software, the survey fi ndings reveal insuffi cient investment in sophisticated BI analysis tools.

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The availability and use of competitive and business intelligence in South African business organisations

Increased complexities in making effective and timely business decisions in highly competitive markets have driven organisations worldwide to adopt business intelligence (BI) technologies. Large en...

Exploring business intelligence and its depth of maturity in Thai SMEs

Due to the complexities of making effective and timely business decisions in highly competitive markets, Data-driven decision-making using Business Intelligence (BI) applications has attracted many organisations worldwide. However, despite these applications being suited for use in most organisations regardless of size, only the larger enterprises have reached a stage of maturity in BI use while small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) still lag behind. Whilst many academic researchers have conducted BI research focused on large organisations, literature relating to BI adoption within SMEs has remained limited. To fill this research gap and support the adoption rate of BI in SMEs, this paper proposes a research framework for identifying the current state of BI adoption by SMEs and the enabling factors that impact BI adoption in SMEs. Future research directions for using this framework are also discussed.

A research framework for the adoption of Business Intelligence by Small and Medium-sized enterprises

The telecommunication industry is characterized as being volatile due to the nature of fast-moving technological changes. It is necessary therefore to accept that ordinary everyday business decisions that are taken to solve problems or identify opportunities are knowledgeable, accurate and timeous. These informed decisions are necessary in the normal course of every day business activities to ensure that the industry continues to grow and deliver effective and efficient services in terms of its mandate. What is assumed in terms of this article is that good decisions are not consistently made in the telecommunications sector, resulting in profit maximization being compromised. The question thus arises whether profitability will increase if consistent and good decisions are made in the ordinary course of doing business. This research attempted to address the question posed above and, although both approaches are addressed, more emphasis is placed on the technical aspect than on the business processes.

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J. O'Brien

Papers

Business intelligence and the telecommunications industry: can business intelligence lead to higher profits?

Mode-switching as Face-saving Resource in a Synchronous Online Class about Linguistic Racism