Empowering SMEs through Business Intelligence

Introduction

Business intelligence (BI) systems are becoming more popular and are used by both large and small and medium-sized businesses. They are utilized to support a variety of business decisions, from tactical to strategic ones. BI may be seen as a barrier that protects enterprises as well as a collection of tools and best practices that enable senior executives to access and analyze corporate data and transform it into information that can be used to make rapid choices. The display of the results was done with the help of Biblioshiny and VOSviewer's bibliometric tools. In short, BI may be defined as the process that helps to highlight the most pertinent information from a vast amount of data. BI is not a product or technology that can be bought and placed in a business to address problems, even though many tools on the market can assist in the implementation of such systems. As a result, BI integrates products, technology, and processes to arrange the crucial data that management should use to boost the performance and revenues of the company.

The first reference on the term of Business Intelligence was emerged in 1958 by the researcher Luhn H.P., who defined it as the ability to grasp the interrelationships of events, which present themselves in such a way as to guide their action towards a desired goal. Several years later, in 1989 Howard Dresner defined Business Intelligence (BI) as a broad term that includes concepts and methods that improve the ability of businesses to make decisions through decision support systems based on recorded events. For Business Intelligence many definitions have been given from time to time by several authors and researchers. Pechenizkiy in 2006 defined it as the new technology for understanding the past and predicting the future. Although, Business Intelligence is a broad category of technology that enables the collection, storage, access, and analysis of data to help business executives make better decisions and analyze their business performance through deep insight into data. Business Intelligence as we know it today evolved from Decision Support Systems (DSS) that began in the 1960s and evolved in the mid-1980s, to lead in the late 1980s to Executive Support Systems Information Systems (ESS), in Management Information Systems (MIS), and later in data warehouses and Business Intelligence systems which replaced these older systems. European Union's systems no longer offer simple static analyzes like previous systems but are a comprehensive solution for businesses and organizations for strategy planning, customer relationship management and collaboration.

Tools of business intelligence speed up the information analysis and performance evaluation, but are valuable in helping companies to reduce inefficiencies, illustrate possible difficulties, indicate profits, to enhance more their competitive advantage and improve the decision-making process. SMEs that function as social communities exist to enhance competitive advantage by creating and using new ideas and knowledge, while some researchers focus on the application of knowledge and argue that SMEs are entities that must apply knowledge to enhance their competitive advantage. Moreover, the main function of SMEs, like any form of business, is "how to make better use of the knowledge that their employees possess but this knowledge is not transmitted accordingly within the organization". However, business intelligence can contribute to the way knowledge is created by upgrading capabilities by incorporating emerging technologies and interacting with the external environment of firms.

The current research work aims: (i) to highlight the role of Business Intelligence in the enhancement of the competitive advantage of SMEs and the improvement of the decision-making process and (ii) to indicate the research trends of the studied field. To approach the research question, a bibliometric analysis has been applied. The data retrieved from Scopus and for the visualization of the findings the bibliometric tools of Biblioshiny and VOSviewer have been used.

There are five sections in the paper. The literature study on the topic of business intelligence and how it benefits SMEs is presented in " Literature review " section. The tools and techniques are listed in " Materials and methods " section. The results are illustrated in " Results " section, and the article is discussed and concluded in " Discussion and conclusions " section.