Abstract
Organizations produce churns of complex, opaque, and meaningless data. Business intelligence systems (BIS) help organizations efficiently use their data in promptly making quality decisions. The limitations of conventional BIS in processing the volume, variety, and veracity of data available in organizations and the operational cost of maintaining its infrastructure gave rise to implementing Cloud BIS, which describes the deployment of BIS over the cloud platform enabling resource elasticity, moderate usage cost, unlimited resources, and offering greater value at a reduced cost than the traditional BIS. BIS aids a productive supply chain and given the complexities of Africa's supply chain and high volatility of its business environment, BIS over the cloud platform would be a great enabler. This chapter aims to provide an understanding of how BIS will transform supply chain management in Africa's emerging market.
TopBusiness Intelligence System (Bis)
Business Intelligence System (BIS) is a term that describes a broad range of analytical software and solutions for gathering, consolidating, analysing and providing access to information in ways that enable firms to derive good business insight to facilitate meaningful decision-making (Adelman et al., 2002). Operations within firms produce churns of raw data that are complex, opaque and meaningless. This data could be a source of competitive advantage and new strategic direction for organisations if properly gathered, transformed and analysed to produce actionable insight in ways that facilitate decision making. BI is the result of in-depth analysis of detailed business data and potentially encompass knowledge management, enterprise resource planning, decision support systems and data mining (Gangadharan & Swamy, 2004). Golfarelli et al. (2004) emphasise that the monitoring of time-critical operational processes is made possible by an efficient BI system which allows tactical and operational decisions to align with the overall firm strategy. The primary objective of BI is to drive prompt quality decision-making, not instinct or gut feeling but fact-based, reflecting the reality of current trends.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): It provides users with virtual infrastructure, for example, servers and data storage space, and supplied an on-demand basis.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): It delivers development environment services to users where they can develop and run in-house built applications, which might include an operating system, a programming language execution environment, databases and web servers.
Data-as-a-Service (DaaS): It is a model in which data is readily accessible through a Cloud-based platform, a new way for businesses to access critical data within an existing pool of data.
Emerging Market: Emerging markets are countries that are transitioning from the “developing” phase to the “developed” phase.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): It is a delivery model that provides users access to developer applications running in the cloud, eliminating the need to have it installed or used on the user's private computers.
Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is a technology that makes available computing services over the internet.