Introduction
Business intelligence (BI) can be defined as collection of people, process and tools working towards the organization strategically objective. It is used to provide right information to right people at right time enhancing productivity in an organization resulting in real competitive advantage (Şerbănescu, 2010). This paper is intended as a brief overview of BI along with what are the needs in an organization which requires BI capabilities and how it relates to winning for an organization.
In 1970’s Decision Support Systems (DSS) were specifically designed for upper management to aid in organizational decisions. An era, where competitive advantage lied in static analysis vs. dynamic analysis, individual work skills specialization mattered more than team work, need of knowledge was emphasized than sharing of knowledge. As further comparison provided in “Old World” and ‘New World’ section in “THE ROLE OF COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE IN THE COURSE OF BUSINESS PROCESS” by Gaidelys (2010, pg. 1058) , time has witnessed changing trend of workers transforming into more of what we call today information workers. And with this trend of empowerment, decisions started to be made all over the organization thus creating the need of system which provides accurate information, at right time in right format available to right people not just too upper management in an organization anymore. Let us discuss BI capabilities for which organizations needs to enable people accessing the right information. In an organization, everyone's job performance is tied with some goals and objectives to achieve, and achieving those goals are usually means winning for that individual or group of people or an entire organization. Starting with C- level executives who are mostly concerned with aligning business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization and interested in knowing that whether they are meeting their strategic objectives or not, winning for them usually are in terms of growing market share, increase value for stake holders. Vice President level executives for each departments are usually responsible for enablement for their respective verticals and translating key strategies into measurable actionable activities. Directors are in turn responsible for directing the departmental activity in the direction specified by measurable activities which represent the strategies developed by C- Levels executives and are often responsible for overall department performance and winning usually means to them in term of achieving sales target of a year. Last but not least managers are responsible for managing group of people and scope of work to be developed by those workers for instance in a shoe factory manager might be responsible for production of x numbers of shoes in a month and achieving that target could mean win for him. Similarly, for many roles in an organization winning means something different for them such as for project managers winning means successful project completions, to facility manager winning means properly maintained facility and similarly to sales person winning means meeting his sales quota.
Now as we understand that how winning means different to different roles in the organization let us take a deeper