An Exploratory Study of Infrastructure Barriers and the Role of Semantic Data Exchange Technologies in the Provisioning of Business Intelligence Services

Business Intelligence BI has been a top technology development concern for high-ranking IT executives over the past decade. The objective of BI is to use data analysis as a competitive weapon, deeply integrated into business processes. The ability of an organization to provide enterprise-level BI services depends heavily on its IT strategy, itself a function of existing technology investment. Previous research has described four IT architecture stages ranging from isolated applications to modular services, each with increasing complexity and service capabilities. Representatives from four companies were interviewed about the status of their BI activities, and the resulting data helps identify common barriers faced by these organizations in the provisioning of enterprise-level BI services. Interview results also describe the success of a limited-scope operational BI system by one of these firms, and the role of semantic data exchange technologies, primarily XML, in this system.