Abstract:

Business intelligence (BI) has been used increasingly as a necessary tool for organizations to support daily business operations and to understand market behavior. When implementing BI, one very important task is to make sure that organizations follow a good BI architectural plan in their implementation process so as to ascertain the success of their BI investment. Well-designed
architecture is significant because it serves as a strong foundation in supporting business requirements and in controlling the entire BI environment. A review of the literature, however, shows that there is a lack of research in the area of BI architecture. In response to this, this paper proposes a framework of BI architecture which contains five main layers: data source, ETL, data warehouse, end user, and metadata layers. These five layers are essential to the smooth functional of a BI system. By including all these five layers, organizations are assured they will be able to maximize return on their BI investments.