Business Intelligence: the implementation of a BI solution to a case study

Business intelligence (BI) includes activities, processes and technological skills which fall under the scope of the corporate IT system. Over the years, the latter has been playing an increasingly important role due to the needs of the “Information Age” (aka Computer Age/Digital Age) applied to the economy and management. In a business context, the ability to analyze large amounts of data produced by business processes is of fundamental importance: data often comes from different and heterogeneous sources and therefore there is a need to unify structures and formats. Furthermore, data can be redundant, inaccurate, incomplete and there may be the need for "cleaning", or they just might not be easy to integrate and use and therefore it might be necessary to transform them into easy-to-read information for the company actors. The Business Intelligence system, therefore, has the purpose of enhancing company data with the aim of analyzing current and historical data and improving strategic decision-making providing a competitive advantage. The objective of this thesis is to present the work I did during my curricular internship at the consulting firm Bios Management std, headquartered in Santa Vittoria d'Alba (CN). The thesis is structured in four chapters: •??In the first chapter, a general overview of the history of BI and the architecture of a BI system is given. •??In the second chapter, I focused in more detail on the BI software BOARD, of which I learned the main functionalities during my curricular internship. •??In order to get a more practical idea of consulting through the use and implementation of BI solutions, a case study was presented in the third chapter: a project I worked on supervised by some Senior Consultants. •??Finally, in the last chapter, an analysis was carried out on the job of the BI consultant. Also, a QFD (Quality Function Deployment) analysis and a Q-Bench algorithm were applied to identify the Technical Specifications on which should be best to focus on for an eventual new version of the current model of BOARD.