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Business Intelligence 2.0: A General Overview

Juan Trujillo and Alejandro Maté

Lucentia Research Group

Department of Software and Computing Systems
University of Alicante
Spain
{jtrujillo,amate}@dlsi.ua.es

Summary. Business Intelligence (BI) solutions allow decision makers to query,

understand, and analyze business data in order to make better decisions. How-
ever, as the technology and society evolve, faster and better informed decisions are
required. Nowadays, it is not enough to use only the information from the own
organization and making isolated decisions, but rather requiring also to include in-
formation present in the web like opinions or information about competitors, while
using collective intelligence, collaborating through social networks, and supporting
the BI system with cloud computing. In response to this situation, a vision of a
new generation of BI, BI 2.0, based on the evolution of the web and the emerging
technologies, arises. However, researchers differ in their vision of this BI evolution.
In this paper, we provide an overview of the aspects proposed to be included in
BI 2.0. We describe which success factors and technologies have motivated each
aspect. Finally, we review how tool developers are including these new features in
the next generation of BI solutions.

Keywords: Data warehouses, business intelligence 2.0, web 2.0, real-time,

cloud computing, collaborative BI, social networks, collective intelligence,
crowdsourcing.

5.1 Introduction

Over the last decade, the use of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions has been
steadily increasing. Even in the recent recession period, a study from the
Gartner Group showed that the BI market not only did not decrease, but
instead it grew 4% [1]. BI solutions allow decision makers to query, under-
stand, and analyze business data, in order to make better decisions and gain
a competitive edge. Traditionally, BI applications allow managers and deci-
sion makers to acquire useful knowledge about the current performance and
problems of the business from the data stored in their organization, by means
of a variety of technologies. These technologies range from data warehousing,
data mining, and OLAP, to business performance management and periodical
business reports. Research in these areas has produced consolidated solutions,

M.-A. Aufaure and E. Zimányi (Eds.): eBISS 2011, LNBIP 96, pp. 98–116, 2012.

c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
5 Business Intelligence 2.0: A General Overview 99

techniques, and methodologies, and there is a variety of commercial products

available that are based on these results.
More recently, a new trend in BI applications has emerged: BI applica-
tions no longer limit their analysis to the data of their own organization.
Increasingly, they also source their data from the outside, thus complement-
ing internal company data with value-adding information from the Web (e.g.
retail prices of products sold by competitors or opinions posted by customers),
in order to provide richer insights into the new dynamics of business and to
better support decision-making processes. As a result, BI applications aim
to assist modern management practices, where decision-making requires a
comprehensive view of the market and the business environment as a whole,
thus BI solutions using just internal company data no longer suffices. On the
other hand, at the same time as data from the Web is being included into
BI applications, BI applications are also evolving towards the web. Recently,
internal company information systems are being transformed into BI as a
service (e.g. hosted BI platforms for small and medium-sized companies) and
software support to manage business outsourcing or crowdsourcing is the tar-
get of huge investments and the focus of enormous research efforts by both
industry and academia.
Nevertheless, this trend is not limited to just relocate the BI processes onto
the web, but rather to transform how BI is performed. This transformation is
being influenced by the apparition of different, new technologies in the web
2.0, as well as the recent rising of the social networks [2]. Together, these
factors provide a general vision of which are the features the next generation
of BI tools should include. However, when analyzing the influence of the
different factors on BI processes, there is no clear consensus. While some
authors [3, 4, 5] focus on the technical aspects and propose to adapt the
most recent techniques to the current BI tools, others describe a complete
transformation of the BI processes [6, 7]. In our reseach group, and according
to this new evolution of classical BI, we have been organizing two editions of
the BEWEB Workshop [8, 9] trying to allocate this evolution. Furthermore,
in [2], we also collected different trends related to Business Intelligence and
the web.
In this paper, we provide an overview of the different aspects of the so-called
“BI 2.0”, how the web has influenced BI and how BI is reacting to this influ-
ence, including the analysis of technical challenges that must be overcomed, as
well as how the current BI tools are integrating the new features. We analyze
which are the common aspects envisioned, in order to identify the scope of the
2.0 generation. In order to visualize how these new aspects could be integrated
into the traditional architecture of a BI system based on data warehousing, we
show a potential architecture in figure 5.1. In this figure, we can see how tradi-
tional Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) batch processes are now
being substituted by real-time integration processes. These processes should
also integrate data coming from the web or, alternatively, this data should be
integrated into the analysis at later stages, without being stored in the Data