Acquiring Competitive Advantage through Business Intelligence

Background

Software systems are widely used in virtually all industries as a means of automating business processes. Organizations deploy them in order to provide innovative and value adding services, as well as to reduce their operational costs (Martikainen, 2007). According to Tyrvainen et al. (2008), software is vertically integrated in the beginning of its lifecycle; often both software and hardware are produced by the same vendor. However, as the organizations need to focus their efforts on a specific part in their business, parts of the software are outsourced to subcontractors or otherwise acquired from third parties. As a result, in many cases, the initially vertically integrated software eventually becomes split into a set of horizontal software layers with standardized interfaces among them, and with the software at each layer being provided by independent software vendors (Mazhelis et al., 2012).

Today software is increasingly needed, both for new products as well as in various development and manufacturing processes. Software products fall into the categories of standardized and tailor-made software project business, which are polar opposites in the international software industry (Cusumano, 2004).