Developing Strategic Capability Through Business Intelligence Applications

Company performance can be measured at all levels across an organization, and in the German healthcare industry, business intelligence systems play a crucial role in achieving this. For one major health insurance company (discussed here as an alias – AK Healthcare), the deployment of business intelligence applications has supported sustained growth in turnover and market share in the past five years. In this chapter, these tools are classified within an appropriate conceptual framework which encompasses the organization's information infrastructure and associated processes. Different components of the framework are identified and examples are given: systems infrastructure, data provision/access control, the BI tools and technologies, report generation, and information users. The use and integration of business intelligence tools in the strategy development process is then analyzed, and the key functions and features of these tools for strategic capability development are discussed. Research findings encompass system access, report characteristics, and end-users' capabilities.