Emerging Business Intelligence Technologies for SMEs

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) are socially and economically important, since they represent 98% of all enterprises, providing around 90 million jobs in the European Union, and contribute to entrepreneurship and innovation. However, SMEs face particular difficulties in order to be competitive in a global world. In recent time, technology applications in different fields, especially Business Intelligence (BI) have been developed rapidly and considered to be one of the most significant uses of information technology. BI is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. This represents a tremendous competitive advantage that allows achieving and exploring the collective intelligence of the organization, enabling contextual, agile, and simplified information exchange and collaboration among distributed workforce and networks of partners and customers, which can be defined as Enterprise 2.0. Despite these advantages, the companies applying such systems may also encounter problems in decision-making processes because of the highly diversified interactions within the systems. Hence, the choice of a suitable BI platform for SMEs is important to take the great advantage of using information technology in all organizational fields. The authors analyze seven open source Business Intelligence tools, free of charge, given that one of the main objectives is to reduce costs and enhance Enterprise 2.0 using new open source technologies.