Business Intelligence Tools for Social E-Enterprises

Abstract

Social enterprises can tackle a wide range of social and environmental issues and contribute to economic growth but they also benefit people and the planet. However, social enterprises face particular difficulties, in order to be financial sustainable and get their social mission accomplished in a global world. In recent time, technology applications in different fields, especially Business Intelligence (BI), have been developed rapidly and considered to be one of the most significant uses of information technology. BI is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. This represents a tremendous competitive advantage that allows achieving and exploring the collective intelligence of the organization, enabling contextual, agile, and simplified information exchange and collaboration among distributed stakeholders and networks of partners. Despite these advantages, the organizations applying such systems may also encounter problems in decision-making process because of the highly diversified interactions within the systems. Hence, the choice of a suitable BI platform for social enterprises is important to take the great advantage of using information technology in all organizational fields. This chapter aims at addressing the problems existed in the social e-enterprises, describing and evaluating the major open source BI tools that can have strong impact on social enterprise change and development.