Business Intelligence (BI) includes all concepts, models and information systems designed to provide support, carry out and control operational activities. Moreover, it is expected that BI, to some degree, will provide context-sensitive information to employees in order to allow for more prominent decision-making activities. Decision Support Systems (DSS) are information systems aimed at providing business and organisational support for decision-making activities, thus being a complement to BI.
BI and DSS systems, by modelling, analysing and providing useful information, aims at improving efficiency and effectiveness. The use of real-time monitoring, simulation, optimisation, predictive and prescriptive tools is helping companies to reduce their time to market, to enhance the use rate of assets and to provide real time transparency. Moreover, they are allowing companies to anticipate future needs and to support autonomous decision.
A challenge for BI and DSS can be presented through the need to provide personalised collaboration tools, which are supported by adaptive learning techniques. There is a growing need to generate customised digital contents, such as dynamic documents, reports and dashboards. In addition, the increasing number of smart devices and proprietary operating systems requires that BI and DSS approaches must have device independency, thus being able to efficiently communicate with different protocols and systems with the objective of aggregating vital data and transmitting the decision-maker’s actions.
