A conceptual framework for business intelligence based on activities monitoring systems

Most enterprises have spent an enormous amount of money and time, managing information about their business elements. Such information is often scattered in disparate legacy, operational and enterprise information systems, appointing the aggregation of valuable information and decision-making support quite difficult. Business Intelligence (BI) and their associated processes and tools are helping enterprises to solve this problem. This paper presents the principles and challenges of BI domain and evaluates its current approaches. The limitations of the above approaches will provide the basis for the design and development of a framework that pursues real time insight to business information, as well as, instantaneous awareness and appropriate response to critical business events across the entire enterprise. The proposed framework is based on Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) systems paradigm and attempts to create a unified enterprise-reporting environment. It was applied in a large Northern Greek manufacturing company in the last six months.