Towards Ad-Hoc and Collaborative Business Intelligence

The success of organizations and business networks depends on fast and well-founded decisions taken by the relevant people in their specific area of responsibility. To enable timely and well-founded decisions, it is often necessary to perform ad-hoc analyses in a collaborative manner involving domain experts, line-of-business managers, key suppliers, or customers. Current Business Intelligence (BI) solutions fail to meet the challenges of ad-hoc and collaborative decision support, thus slowing down and hurting organizations. To move towards ad-hoc and collaborative BI, we envision a highly scalable and flexible BI platform. The main building blocks of this platform are a flexible and efficient concept for the management of business context information, an intuitive and powerful methodology for the configuration of a BI system, a concept of an information self-service for business users over data sources within and across organizations, a collaborative decision making environment, and an architecture for the whole system that complements current BI systems. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-038-5.ch012