Benefits and barriers of self-service business intelligence implementation in micro-enterprises: a case of ABC Travel & Consulting

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementSmall medium enterprises (hereinafter: SME) represent 99.8 % of firms in the non-financial business sector of the European Union. SME’s cover three different types of companies, namely micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises. Micro-enterprises are the most common type of SME in the European Economic Area, accounting for 93.2 % of the non-financial business sector (Muller, Julius, Herr & Peycheva, 2017). Due to their importance, the focus of this work will be on micro-enterprises. They are defined by two factors: firstly, the number of employees has to be lower than ten, and secondly, the turnover or the total assets must be lower than or equal to two million Euros (European Commission, 2014). Business intelligence systems (hereinafter: BIS) have become significantly important in the business world and academic community over the last two decades (Chen, Chiang & Storey, 2012). The global revenue reached a volume of $18.3 billion in 2017 and is forecasted to reach$22.8 billion by the end of 2020. Modern BIS continue to expand more rapidly than the overall market (Moore, 2017). The benefits of the integration of BIS can be seen longterm, users are typically decision makers at higher organizational levels (Puklavec, Oliveira & Popovic, 2014). With the usage of BIS, knowledge workers such as executives, managers, and analysts can make better and faster decisions (Chaudhuri, Dayal & Narasayya, 2011). The proper usage of BIS can be seen as a prerequisite for business success, but these tools are often complex and require a high level of expertise to work with (Davenport, 2017). It is a challenge for micro companies to implement BIS because they have often only a limited set of financial and human resources (Puklavec, Oliveira & Popovic, 2014)