New Rimvydas Skyrius monograph “Business Intelligence. A Comprehensive Approach to Information Needs, Technologies and Culture” (published by Springer Nature in 2021). In the field of business intelligence, fast and tumultuous developments bring possibilities, expectations, and a good deal of confusion to accompany them.
This book by Rimvydas Skyrius, a professor at Vilnius university’s faculty of Economics and business administration, comes at a time when the situation in the field experiences both significant developments and challenges. The developments are rather visible: larger surge of interest in analytics, fast development of artificial intelligence techniques, utilization of global information resources, to name a few. The challenges, however, are no less visible: despite huge technical advances, many obstacles still remain, numerous contradictions remain unsolved, and many BI projects fail or do not bring the promised benefits. As numerous research works and real-life cases show, mere possession of advanced technology and voluminous information resources is no longer considered adequate for fulfilling business information needs. This explains the rising interest in managerial and human issues.
The focus of the book is under-researched managerial and human issues in BI. The book addresses several important research gaps – relation between BI maturity and agility, role and features of BI culture, definition of and relations between soft assets – attention, sense, trust. The book steps carefully in a rather vague and ill-defined field of managerial and human issues of BI by relating phenomena to their origins and history, and deliberately leaves technology issues in the background. The author also uses own former research, published in numerous previous research papers and conferences, to give ground to presented arguments.