Graduate Student: Nguyen Phan Anh Huy
研究生: 阮潘英輝
Student ID : M987Z264
Introduction to “Evaluating and Selecting Business Intelligence
Systems by a Fuzzy Weighted Average Approach”
In this ever challenging business environment, Business Intelligence System
(BIS) is one of the survivals of a company, and the functions of information
technology (IT) are becoming increasingly important. On the strategic level, BI
System makes it possible to set objectives precisely and to follow realization of such
established objectives. BI System allows for performing different comparative reports,
e.g. historical results, profitability of particular offers, effectiveness of distribution
channels along with carrying out simulations of development or forecasting future
results on the basis of some assumptions. On the tactical level, BI System may
provide some basis for decision making within marketing, sales, finance, capital
management, etc. The systems allow for optimizing future actions and for modifying
organizational, financial or technological aspects of company performance
appropriately in order to help enterprises realize their strategic objectives more
effectively. From a technical perspective, BI systems offer an integrated set of tools,
technologies and software products that are used to collect heterogenic data from
dispersed sources in order to integrate and analyze data to make it commonly
available. With an effectively executed BI program, businesses can compete by being
better than the competition at leveraging information to improve profits and
performance.
Evaluating the appropriate BIS for required conditions is the critical strategic
decisions in formulating a business strategy. Evaluating the new system is a time
consuming and difficult process, requiring advanced knowledge and deep experience.
For a proper and effective evaluation, the decision maker may need a large amount of
data to be analyzed and many factors to be considered. While building a BIS,
decision-makers are faced with the challenge of selecting the most efficient
information system. The evaluation of a few BIS at the same time with limited
resources is impossible. Thus, BIS selection becomes an efficient resources allocation
procedure. In this resource allocation problem, the evaluation process of alternatives
brings some difficulties. The major problem is the consideration of multiple
objectives which are generally conflicting with each other and measured in different
scales.
Although a number of factors were found to be influential in the choice of BIS.
BIS evaluation is an inherently uncertain activity. To deal with the uncertainty in
decision making, a fuzzy weighted average (FWA) method and centroid ranking
method from Wang et al. (2006) are adopted. Fuzzy weighted average (FWA) is a
function of fuzzy numbers and is useful as an aggregation method in management and
engineering science based on fuzzy sets theory by Zadeh. It provides a discrete
approximate solution by α-cuts level representation of fuzzy sets and interval analysis.
This study presents an empirical approach of BIS evaluation and a real life
evaluation process is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.