Management Information Systems

The challenges and benefits of business intelligence
The results of a study[6] done with more than 100 Latin American managers about IT
adoption had shown that BI was the number one priority on the IT agendas at companies
in Latin America in 2014. This fact was not surprising, as it was consistent with global
business priorities; for example, the 2013 Gartner Manager Program Survey[7] had also
listed BI as the number one priority for CIOs, and a report by IBM on technology trends had
listed BI as one of the four most important trends since 2012[8].
BI was a concept introduced by Howard Dressner at the beginning of the 1990s when he
was an analyst at the Gartner Group. BI referred to the consolidation and analysis of internal
data (for example, transaction data from points of sale) and/or external data (for example,
demographic client data) to make effective decisions. However, combining and integrating
data from different sources was a complex task that required highly sophisticated abilities.
Some of the challenges faced by companies implementing BI were having a dedicated
senior manager leading the process, limited resources, understanding the rules of the
game, the quality and integrity of existing data, understanding and managing internal
expectations, a culture resistant and unwilling to change, complex data integration,
training, justification of the investment and departmental silos.
Despite these challenges, the possible benefits counterbalanced and maintained manager
motivation to implement BI to the maximum, as companies that were able to take advantage
of the system improved their business processes and cost structures, used innovation to
position themselves strategically, detected patterns in their target markets and managed
risk proactively to create a positive impact on the business.
In addition, implementing BI offered other benefits, such as promoting and encouraging an
evidence-based culture for decision-making, controlling the business’s performance to
reach defined objectives, establishing a proactive framework within which to make
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and anticipating and managing change. In addition, BI users accessed data instantly or
almost instantly and invested time in data analysis and understanding it, rather than
spending their time collecting and formatting data. Managers who used BI did not have to
discuss who had the right numbers (because there was only “one version of the truth”),
guaranteeing that data were managed throughout the life cycle and were shared routinely
and automatically in the company.
In global companies, the use of information systems had made it technologically feasible
to capture and store large amounts of data. The numbers were hard to comprehend, but
technicians understood the passage of time through megabytes (a million bytes[9])
transforming into gigabytes (one billion bytes), and from gigabytes to terabytes (equal to
1012 bytes) and from terabytes