How Is BI Used in Industry?: Report from a Knowledge Exchange Network

After being born in industry, the topic of business intelligence (BI), has become an active research topic, spanning research areas such as data warehousing, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), data mining, and data streams. Ideally, BI research should be driven by industry needs. However, only little information on how BI is used in industry is currently available to the BI research community. This industrial paper presents the experiences that the author has obtained from running a number of knowledge exchange activities related to BI, e.g., network meetings and workshops, with partners in industry. The paper presents the network participants, the topics of the knowledge exchange activities, and the lessons learned over the last couple of years. For example, lessons relate to the popularity of OLAP and data mining tools, the time spent on different tasks in BI projects, and the importance of ìsoftî people-related issues. Finally, the paper makes a recommendation on a number of future research topics that are useful in industry.