A Business Process-IT Alignment Method for Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is becoming a key means of providing information necessary for achieving business goals such as improving profits or solving business process issues. This paper proposes a business process-IT alignment method for BI. The proposed method has two phases of business processes: the first phase extracts and checks the validity of hypotheses for achieving business goals and the second phase clarifies the actions needed to implement the hypotheses. Then, business information used in each business process is defined. Four levels of BI systems are proposed in accordance with the maturity of the enterprises they support, and each level is mapped to a subset of the business processes. Finally, three types of models used to clarify and organize the hypotheses and the actions are proposed. Case studies have shown that the method explains a variety of business processes for BI and BI systems.