A Review Of Business Intelligence And Its Maturity Models

African Journal of Business Management Vol. 5(9), pp. 3424-3428, 4 May, 2011
Available online at http://www.academicjournals.org/AJBM
ISSN 1993-8233 ©2011 Academic Journals

Review

A review of business intelligence and its maturity
models
Min-Hooi Chuah1* and Kee-Luen Wong2
1

Faculty of Information, Communication and Technology, University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Perak, Malaysia.
2Faculty of Business and Finance, University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Perak, Malaysia.
Accepted 11 February, 2011

There has been a great deal of recent interest that is driving research and development in the area of
Business Intelligence (BI), due to the purported advantages it provides to organizations that deploy
them skillfully. Although the concept of BI has been established for the past decade,it is fairly new and
there is a limited study to provide systematic maturity guidelines and readiness assessment for such
resourceful initiative. This shortcoming arises from the fact that, the BI market is a relatively new
phenomenon, with most of the pioneering work being driven in an informal, ad-hoc basis by various
vendors in the IT industry. This paper explores the numerous of BImaturity model through a
comprehensive review of academic as well as practitioner’s literature. Several maturity models have
been reviewed such as business intelligence development model (BIDM), TDWI’s maturity model,
Business Intelligence Maturity Hierarchy, Hewlett Package Business Intelligence Maturity Model,
Gartner’s Maturity Model, Business Information Maturity Model, AMR Research’s BusinessIntelligence/
Performance Management Maturity Model, Infrastructure Optimization Maturity Model and Ladder of
business intelligence (LOBI). Among the findings, most of them do not consider all factors affecting on
BI. Some of BI maturity models focus on the technical aspect and some of the models focus on
business point of view. This paper represents the first rigorously researched step towardsunderstanding the business intelligence maturity model. The goal of the research presented in this
paper is to bridge this missing gap between academia and industry, through a thorough formal study of
the maturity model pertaining to BI. The driving motivation is to develop a better maturity model that
can serve as a useful guideline for enterprises which are planning, or undertakinglarge-scale BI
initiatives.
Key words: Business, intelligence, maturity model.
INTRODUCTION
According to Gartner research report on 2009, business
intelligence (BI) market has gone through high growth
recently. BI applications have become the most essential
technologies to be purchased (Gartner, 2007, 2008,
2009). However, the success for implementing BI is still
questionable (Lupu et al., 1997).About 60 to 70% of
business intelligence applications fail due to the
technology, organizational, cultural and infrastructure
issues (Lupu et al., 1997). In additional, EMC corporation
claimed that many BI initiatives have failed because tools
were not accessible through to end users and the result

*Corresponding author. E-mail: chuahmh@utar.edu.my.

of not meeting the end users’ needeffectively while
Computerworld (2003) avowed that BI projects fail
because of failure to recognize BI projects as cross
organizational business initiatives, unengaged business
sponsors, unavailable or unwilling business representatives, lack of skilled and available staff, no business
analysis activities, no appreciation of the impact of dirty
data on business profitability and nounderstanding of the
necessity for and the use of meta-data.
In fact, the entire BI project planning and implementation always require a large amount of resources and
countless enterprise stakeholders over a period of years
(Moss and Atre, 2003; Olszak and Ziemba, 2007;
Reinschmidt and Francoise, 2000). Therefore, there is
need a maturity model to guide and provide systematic

Chuah and Wong...