Cognitive orientation in business intelligence systems

With the increasing importance of cognitive aspects in decision making, this research addresses how human cognitive abilities, mainly situation awareness and mental models, can be used to drive the decision process in complex decision situations. Cognitive orientation has long been regarded as an important consideration in the development and application of decision support systems (DSS). Rather than cognitive orientation, a data-driven DSS emphasizes access to and manipulation of a series of company internal and external data, compared to a model-driven DSS underpinned by statistical, financial, optimization or simulation models. A business intelligence (BI) system is essentially a kind of data-driven DSS therefore shares the similar drawbacks with traditional DSS. A framework of cognitive BI system is firstly developed. A model of cognition-driven decision process is then proposed based on the system framework. In this framework and decision model, data retrieval, information filtering and knowledge presentation are based on the tacit knowledge elicited from the decision-maker. The final decision is no longer the direct output of a computer system, but the result of decision-making cycles of human-machine interaction. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg