Guidelines for the migration of business intelligence in a developing organisation

Abstract

Business intelligence (BI) is an analytical method used by organisations to extract production data, analyse it and present business users with meaningful insight into operations to support decision-making. The study aimed to provide guidelines for migrating a BI architecture into a growing organisation. Furthermore, the study aimed to provide means of integrating large amounts of data into the organisation’s BI architecture with minimal impact on business operations. Literature was reviewed on concepts such as BI, data warehouses and data migration in accordance with the study. An interpretivist research paradigm was used to conduct a descripto-explanatory case study of a single phenomenon. Qualitative data were collected from participants in the case study environment by means of semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed using ATLAS.ti and the results presented. The results from data collected and analysed from participants concluded that the old BI solution presented several complications such as a poor quality of data, duplicated data and insufficient information presented to the organisation for decision-making purposes. Results further indicated that the data migration from the acquired organisation’s database management system to the organisation used for the research’s database management system, showed complications such as timeline scheduling and resource limitations. Results indicated that the new BI solution provided more accurate data, was cleaned from anomalies, and was easily accessible from one central location. In accordance with the literature reviewed, the case study method utilised, the researcher’s interpretation of the organisation and data gathered, guidelines for the integration of BI architecture in a developing organisation were established. With the successful introduction of the BI solution, management was enabled to predict business decisions more accurately through the utilisation of the migrated data.