Chapter 7: Business Intelligence Challenges for Small and Medium-Sized Business: Leveraging Existing Resources

Small and medium businesses (SMEs) face many unique challenges with business intelligence (BI) initiatives when compared to larger firms. Unfortunately for SMEs, the largest barrier to entry is often the lack of financial resources. However with proper planning and support, an SME can have fruitful BI initiative implementations. To aid in this discovery, this article introduces a five-step, success driven plan for SMEs to approach BI without the need for the investment of resources enjoyed by large enterprises. By simply identifying problems correctly, discovering what data a company is capturing and mining, choosing key performance indicators (KPIs), and training employees to implement the program, any company can have successful BI initiatives, including SMEs.