Business intelligence in decision making in Finnish enterprises

Abstract

This exploratory study focuses on Finnish enterprises and examines how and why they are applying business intelligence today. Especially the process from data into knowledge and how business intelligence is utilized in decision making have been studied. We observed that BI tools improve the speed and quality of decision making and BI tools were coupled with actual decision making. BI tools are used frequently but those are only means to an end and in order to examine how they are used to attain specific outcomes. Most of the end users utilised the loosely-coupled approach, but half of the respondents also utilised BI with tighter coupling, structured human decisions, by using customised analyses and reports for certain problems and even creating ones themselves but the tightest form of coupling, automated decision making, remained rare.