Business Intelligence as a Service: A Vendor's Approach

Demand for business intelligence (BI) applications continues to grow even at a time when demand for most information technology (IT) products is low, showing the importance of BI products for a modern organization. However, globalization changes the way organizations use BI, where geographic location and time independency is becoming more and more important. Gartner's hype-cycle on BI depicts the technology of BI as a Service as being almost on top of the hype cycle, indicating there are high expectations of this new technology. This research advances on existing literature on business intelligence and cloud computing from a development perspective by introducing the concept of business intelligence as a service (BIaaS). The most important deliverable is the BIaaS capability maturity model (CMM) that is introduced here. The BIaaS CMM explains the conceptual model of BIaaS by the creation of the first BIaaS capability model containing key capabilities of BIaaS. The capability model is further enhanced with maturity levels depicting the importance of each BIaaS capability, a maturity matrix suggesting a roadmap for BIaaS solution development, and a BIaaS assessment model introducing a tool for finding problem areas in existing BIaaS solutions. The developed BIaaS CMM ought to support (starting) BIaaS vendors to develop BIaaS solutions by providing an assessment tool for BIaaS solutions. The assessment outcome provides the current maturity of the BIaaS solution and also includes problem areas for solution improvement. The introduction of the CApability Maturity Positioning (CAMP) method for the development of a maturity matrix, which results in the BIaaS maturity model, is significantly different from conventional maturity modeling. To calculate the weight of each capability from the BIaaS capability model, a thorough product review of existing business intelligence and cloud computing products is performed. Analysis of the results and normalizing the outcome of that analysis together with the introduction of a calculation mapping, is input for the creation of the maturity matrix. The maturity matrix is the essential foundation for the developed business intelligence as a Service capability maturity model, which is the main deliverable of this research.