Structuring Collaborative Business Intelligence: A Literature Review

Cooperative work in the processes of analysis and decision support currently gains strong attention in the business world. This is motivated by spreading corporate structures and technical developments like social media and network-oriented data storage that encourage the users´ comprehension and demand for easy communication about data. This article reflects the state of research in the domain of business intelligence regarding the opening of processes for new data sources and analysts. Existing approaches are often labeled collaborative business intelligence (CBI), but differ heavily in definitions and focus. Therefore, a framework is presented and three main fields for the research of CBI are identified, which encompass internal communication, data storage with (external) partners and data analysis with partners. This article compares the findings with developments on the software market and describes open topics in the research domain.