Methodology of development and deployment of Business Intelligence solutions in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Dissertation thesis deals with development and implementation of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) in the Czech Republic. This thesis represents climax of author's up to now effort that has been put into completing a methodological model for development of this kind of applications for SMEs using self-owned skills and minimum of external resources and costs. This thesis can be divided into five major parts. First part that describes used technologies is divided into two chapters. First chapter describes contemporary state of Business Intelligence concept and it also contains original taxonomy of Business Intelligence solutions. Second chapter describes two Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) techniques that were used for building those BI solutions that are introduced in case studies. Second part describes the area of Czech SMEs, which is an environment where the thesis was written and which it is meant to contribute to. This environment is represented by one chapter that defines the differences of SMEs against large corporations. Furthermore, there are author's reasons why he is personally focusing on this area explained. Third major part introduces the results of survey that was conducted among Czech SMEs with support of Department of Information Technologies of Faculty of Informatics and Statistics of University of Economics in Prague. This survey had three objectives. First one was to map the readiness of Czech SMEs for BI solutions development and deployment. Second was to determine major problems and consequent decisions of Czech SMEs that could be supported by BI solutions and the third objective was to determine top factors preventing SMEs from developing and deploying BI solutions. Fourth part of the thesis is also the core one. In two chapters there is the original Methodology for development and deployment of BI solutions by SMEs described as well as other methodologies that were studied. Original methodology is partly based on famous CRISP-DM methodology. Finally, last part describes particular company that has become a testing ground for author's theories and that supports his research. In further chapters it introduces case-studies of development and deployment of those BI solutions in this company, that were build using contemporary BI and KDD techniques with respect to original methodology. In that sense, these case-studies verified theoretical methodology in real use.