The New Era of Business Intelligence Applications: Building from a Collaborative Point of View

Collaborative business intelligence (BI) is widely embraced by enterprises as a way of making the most of their business processes. However, decision makers usually work in isolation without the knowledge or the time needed to obtain and analyze all the available information for making decisions. Unfortunately, collaborative BI is currently based on exchanging e-mails and documents between participants. As a result, information may be lost, participants may become disoriented, and the decision-making task may not yield the needed results. The authors propose a modeling language aimed at modeling and eliciting the goals and information needs of participants of collaborative BI systems. This approach is based on innovative methods to elicit and model collaborative systems and BI requirements. A controlled experiment was performed to validate this language, assessing its understandability, scalability, efficiency, and user satisfaction by analyzing two collaborative BI systems. By using the framework proposed in this work, clear guideless can be provided regarding: (1) collaborative tasks, (2) their participants, and (3) the information to be shared among them. By using the approach to design collaborative BI systems, practitioners may easily trace every element needed in the decision processes, avoiding the loss of information and facilitating the collaboration of the stakeholders of such processes.