ER2015

Invited Keynote: The Business Intelligence Model – Foundations, Experiences, and Ongoing Work
Jennifer Horkoff

Business intelligence (BI) offers tremendous potential for business organizations to gain insights into their day-to-day operations, as well as longer term opportunities and threats. However, most of today’s BI tools are based on models that are too data-oriented from the point of view of business decision makers, difficult to understand in terms of business objectives and strategies. We have proposed to use conceptual modeling in order to bridge this gap between business-level understanding and representations in databases and data warehouses – making BI data meaningful. This talk summarizes past, current and future work on the Business Intelligence Model (BIM) conceptual modeling framework. BIM offers concepts familiar to business decision making—such as goals, strategies, processes, situations, influences, and indicators. Unlike many enterprise models which are meant to be used to derive, manage, or align with IT system implementations, BIM aims to help business users organize and make sense of the vast amounts of data about the enterprise and its external environment. This talk covers core BIM concepts, focusing especially on reasoning with BIM.

BIM includes both qualitative and quantitative reasoning about situations, goals and influences, using data from indicators. Formal reasoning techniques are available using a translation to a subset of the OWL Description Logic (DL). Such reasoning supports strategic analysis of business objectives in light of current enterprise data, allowing analysts to explore scenarios and find alternative strategies. BIM has been expanded to consider tactical refinement (TBIM), and to include the Five Forces Model, to better support strategic decision making. The framework has been applied to several large cases, including a large Canadian Hospital and a leisure cruise business. A prototype implementation has allowed for BIM and TBIM to be taught as part of a graduate course in Information Systems. Ongoing work has focused in several directions, including multidimensional views, comparison of strategic alternatives, and analyzing indicators to find new model relationships or more adequate measures.