Requirements Elicitation for an Inter-Organizational Business Intelligence System for Small and Medium Retail Enterprises

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) is on everyone's lips nowadays, since it provides businesses with the possibility to analyze their business practices and improve them. However, Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) often cannot leverage the positive effects of BI because of missing resources like personnel, knowledge, or money. Since SME pose a major form of business organization, this fact has to be overcome. As the retail industry is a substantial part of the SME branch, we propose an inter-organizational approach for a BI system for retail SME, which allows them to collaboratively collect data and perform analysis task. The aim of our ongoing research effort is the development of such a system following the Design Science Research Methodology. Within this article, the status quo of current BI practices in SME in the retail industry is analyzed through qualitative interviews with ten SME managers. Afterwards, adoption and success factors of BI systems and Inter-organizational Information Systems are worked out in a comprehensive structured literature review. Based on the status quo and the adoption and success factors, first requirements for the acceptance of an inter-organizational BI system are identified and validated in another round of qualitative interviews. This leads to nine functional requirements and three non-functional requirements, which can be used for designing and implementing an inter-organizational BI system for SME in the following research efforts.