Business Intelligence: concepts and application - Implementation of an Intelligent Planning through software Board

Rapid changes in the financial landscape and significant improvements in information technology have brought difficulties for several businesses in recent times. Finding the truly crucial part of information is becoming more and more challenging for a company's management due to the expanding capacity to collect and store massive amounts of internal and external data. This situation of information overload is tackled by a variety of analytic concepts and tools which can be summarised under the term of "Business Intelligence" or BI. The aim of this thesis is to explain the concepts of Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management and show how they actually work. For this purpose, the definition and a brief history of BI is provided in the first chapter, along with an analysis of each element constituting the architecture of a Business Intelligence Software. Moreover, an overview of the BI market is given, making a comparison among the most common BI tools, as well as the social impact of this innovative technology. The second chapter concerns Corporate Performance Management. Starting from defining the difference between CPM and BI, the fundamental concepts of Key Performance Indicator and Data visualization is provided. Putting together all the elements discussed in the first two chapters, the third one regards a software which is both a Business Intelligence and a Corporate Performance Management platform: Board. The choice of studying this specific application is ascribable to the Professional Training I personally conducted at Bios Management ltd., a consulting company which employs Board to carry out the Intelligent Plannings for its customers. Therefore, the market positioning of Board and the major components of the software are deeply analysed. In the fourth chapter a practical application of what explained in theory in the previous section is given, presenting a Business Case I developed by myself during the internship. Finally, conclusions about this particular kind of technology are presented, leaving room for the various future developments of Business Intelligence world.