Ketterän liiketoimintatiedon hallinnan mahdollistajat - Case SAP

One of the key requirements for achieving competitive advantage is to utilize gathered information more effectively than before with the help of emergent technology innovations and enhanced information management. In order to remain competitive and compete with the help of data, organizations and researchers have paid attention to a new wave of business intelligence, referred to as agile business intelligence. Agile business intelligence enables faster decision-making in faster pace than traditional business intelligence due to the emergence of new technology directions. Hence, the technology has evolved in a way that agile business intelligence can bring more value to the organizations simplifying the business intelligence architecture and enhancing data processing by utilizing operational data more effectively. The primary objective of the thesis was to identify the key factors that enable agile business intelligence. The secondary objective was related to the benefits that agile business intelligence provides to the organizations compared with the traditional business intelligence solutions and platforms. The thesis consisted of two different parts: the first part was related to investigate agile business intelligence from the academic point of view using a systematic literature review as a research method. In this part, the definition of agile business intelligence was formalized and the different enablers and benefits were discovered based on the literature. The second part was related to investigate agile BI enablers, which were founded in internal training materials regarding the SAP landscape. Findings from the latter part were reflected on the findings from the first part drawing a synthesis between the enablers and benefit from the different parts. The key findings of agile BI were divided into two main categories: agile methodologies and agile technologies. The first ones were related to the different agile development methods of business intelligence such as Scrum in order to organizations are able to react faster pace to the changing requirements in the business environment. The key enablers of the latter category were in-memory BI, mobile BI, cloud BI, operational BI and self-service BI. The main benefits of these enablers were related to the reduced query processing providing real-time data on decision-making, the increased flexibility of the systems and easier access to the data which facilitate more accurate and punctual decision-making. These benefits reflected on SAP BI landscape which provided the same benefits but also simplification was in a central role in SAP BI landscape which reduces the need for extract and load data from the different source systems