BIS life-cycle is comprised of 6 following phases:
2.1 Feasibility Study The initial phase of BI project is to identify business needs and opportunities. Subsequently, BI team will come up with a preliminary report on costs and benefits, in order to assess if investment in BI solution is worthwhile. 2.2 Project Planning On one hand, project planning involves evaluation. The aim of evaluation is to estimate whether BI implementation could be attained under current financial condition, and to assess the expending on BI infrastructures under the specific circumstance. On the
other hand, project plan in detail will be offered. It involves stages with specific checking points, deadline and documents which need to be handed over. Thus, documents for organizational structure, network service state and information system in use and so on is needed. 2.3 Business Analysis At this phase, interviews in person or meeting in group will be organized, in order to capture business needs and requirements. As a result, a well-defined business needs specification will be generated. Afterwards, data source design and meta-data analysis will be completed. Finally, a combination of the above results will produce logic model. Senior managers and CEO will be invited to participate in meeting and interview. 2.4 System Design This phase is the most difficult in the entire progress of BI implementation. Ongoing refinement of the logic model, designing the data model and object oriented model is to reinterpret demands as a model, and then abstract a real business model, such as AgGro’s structure and business process. 2.5 Development This phase is likely to time-consuming. According to the iterative development model and the above models, such as data model, prototyping validation will be conducted continuously, until final applications of BI tools have been completed. In order to do so, internal staff will be invited to engage in prototyping validation. 2.6 System Implementation
On one hand, this phase is to make end users familiar with the BI tools. Skills of utilizing BI tools will be provided in training for managers. Equally importantly, basics of BI will be presented so that managers can acquire conceptual imagery on BI solution. The documents for the entire process, such as testing report and data model, are prepared. The BI team will present the final report involving system performance, technical support and so on. Therefore, managers will spend as much time as they can on familiarizing themselves with the BI tools.
3. Business Feasibility
Overall, benefits can be classified into two categories, corporate performance enhancement and customer satisfaction promotion, if BI has been implemented successfully. 3.1 Corporate Performance Enhancement Initially, the BI solution offer staff a set of tools which are based on real-time access service. With BI tools, staff, managers and the CEO can instantly access reports, and perform a query anywhere, even if information has been updated at any minute. To offer timely, accurate and reliable information as expected is BI infrastructure. More importantly, BI solution requests for report GUI which allows users to customize reporting. In addition, different file formats are available, and customized report has been exported. As a result of this, staff are able to work with familiar office software. It is precisely because the BI solution depends on the set of rudimentary tools that advanced functions, such as predictive analytics, could be implemented. BI solution enables corporation to make informed decision. As a result, competitive advantages are likely to be constructed which can be partially attributed to the BI infrastructure. Because of convenient access to reports, while decision-making processes are undertaken, comparison can be done sensibly rather than relying on guesswork. More importantly, it could assist in conversion knowledge and experience into