business intelligence and analytics: from big data to big impact

SPECIAL ISSUE: BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHBUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS:FROM BIG DATA TO BIG IMPACTHsinchun ChenEller College of Management, University of Arizona,Tucson, AZ 85721 U.S.A. {hchen@eller.arizona.edu}Roger H. L. ChiangCarl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati,Cincinnati, OH 45221-0211 U.S.A. {chianghl@ucmail.uc.edu}Veda C. StoreyJ. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University,Atlanta, GA 30302-4015 U.S.A. {vstorey@gsu.edu}Business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) has emerged as an important area of study for both practitionersand researchers, reflecting the magnitude and impact of data-related problems to be solved in contemporarybusiness organizations. This introduction to the MIS Quarterly Special Issue on Business Intelligence Researchfirst provides a framework that identifies the evolution, applications, and emerging research areas of BI&A.BI&A 1.0, BI&A 2.0, and BI&A 3.0 are defined and described in terms of their key characteristics andcapabilities. Current research in BI&A is analyzed and challenges and opportunities associated with BI&Aresearch and education are identified. We also report a bibliometric study of critical BI&A publications,researchers, and research topics based on more than a decade of related academic and industry publications.Finally, the six articles that comprise this special issue are introduced and characterized in terms of theproposed BI&A research framework.Keywords: Business intelligence and analytics, big data analytics, Web 2.0IntroductionBusiness intelligence and analytics (BI&A) and the relatedfield of big data analytics have become increasingly importantin both the academic and the business communities over thepast two decades. Industry studies have highlighted thissignificant development. For example, based on a survey ofover 4,000 information technology (IT) professionals from 93countries and 25 industries, the IBM Tech Trends Report(2011) identified business analytics as one of the four majortechnology trends in the 2010s. In a survey of the state ofbusiness analytics by Bloomberg Businessweek (2011), 97percent of companies with revenues exceeding $100 millionwere found to use some form of business analytics. A reportby the McKinsey Global Institute (Manyika et al. 2011) predictedthat by 2018, the United States alone will face a shortageof 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills,as well as a shortfall of 1.5 million data-savvy managers withthe know-how to analyze big data to make effective decisions.Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google and emeritus professorat the University of California, Berkeley, commented onthe emerging opportunities for IT professionals and studentsin data analysis as follows:MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 1-XX/December 2012 1

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchSo what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. Andwhat is complementary to data? Analysis. So myrecommendation is to take lots of courses about howto manipulate and analyze data: databases, machinelearning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, andso on. 1The opportunities associated with data and analysis in differentorganizations have helped generate significant interestin BI&A, which is often referred to as the techniques, technologies,systems, practices, methodologies, and applicationsthat analyze critical business data to help an enterprise betterunderstand its business and market and make timely businessdecisions. In addition to the underlying data processing andanalytical technologies, BI&A includes business-centricpractices and methodologies that can be applied to varioushigh-impact applications such as e-commerce, market intelligence,e-government, healthcare, and security.This introduction to the MIS Quarterly Special Issue onBusiness Intelligence Research provides an overview of thisexciting and high-impact field, highlighting its many challengesand opportunities. Figure 1 shows the key sectionsof this paper, including BI&A evolution, applications, andemerging analytics research opportunities. We then reporton a bibliometric study of critical BI&A publications,researchers, and research topics based on more than a decadeof related BI&A academic and industry publications. Educationand program development opportunities in BI&A arepresented, followed by a summary of the six articles thatappear in this special issue using our research framework.The final section concludes the paper.BI&A Evolution: Key Characteristicsand CapabilitiesThe term intelligence has been used by researchers inartificial intelligence since the 1950s. Business intelligencebecame a popular term in the business and IT communitiesonly in the 1990s. In the late 2000s, business analytics wasintroduced to represent the key analytical component in BI(Davenport 2006). More recently big data and big dataanalytics have been used to describe the data sets and analyticaltechniques in applications that are so large (fromterabytes to exabytes) and complex (from sensor to socialmedia data) that they require advanced and unique data1 “Hal Varian Answers Your Questions,” February 25, 2008 (http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/02/25/hal-varian-answers-your-questions/).storage, management, analysis, and visualization technologies.In this article we use business intelligence and analytics(BI&A) as a unified term and treat big data analytics asa related field that offers new directions for BI&A research.BI&A 1.0As a data-centric approach, BI&A has its roots in the longstandingdatabase management field. It relies heavily onvarious data collection, extraction, and analysis technologies(Chaudhuri et al. 2011; Turban et al. 2008; Watson andWixom 2007). The BI&A technologies and applicationscurrently adopted in industry can be considered as BI&A 1.0,where data are mostly structured, collected by companiesthrough various legacy systems, and often stored in commercialrelational database management systems (RDBMS). Theanalytical techniques commonly used in these systems,popularized in the 1990s, are grounded mainly in statisticalmethods developed in the 1970s and data mining techniquesdeveloped in the 1980s.Data management and warehousing is considered the foundationof BI&A 1.0. Design of data marts and tools forextraction, transformation, and load (ETL) are essential forconverting and integrating enterprise-specific data. Databasequery, online analytical processing (OLAP), and reportingtools based on intuitive, but simple, graphics are used toexplore important data characteristics. Business performancemanagement (BPM) using scorecards and dashboards helpanalyze and visualize a variety of performance metrics. Inaddition to these well-established business reporting functions,statistical analysis and data mining techniques areadopted for association analysis, data segmentation andclustering, classification and regression analysis, anomalydetection, and predictive modeling in various business applications.Most of these data processing and analytical technologieshave already been incorporated into the leading commercialBI platforms offered by major IT vendors includingMicrosoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP (Sallam et al. 2011).Among the 13 capabilities considered essential for BI platforms,according to the Gartner report by Sallam et al. (2011),the following eight are considered BI&A 1.0: reporting,dashboards, ad hoc query, search-based BI, OLAP, interactivevisualization, scorecards, predictive modeling, and datamining. A few BI&A 1.0 areas are still under active developmentbased on the Gartner BI Hype Cycle analysis foremerging BI technologies, which include data mining workbenchs,column-based DBMS, in-memory DBMS, and realtimedecision tools (Bitterer 2011). Academic curricula inInformation Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) often2 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchFigure 1. BI&A Overview: Evolution, Applications, and Emerging Researchinclude well-structured courses such as database managementsystems, data mining, and multivariate statistics.BI&A 2.0Since the early 2000s, the Internet and the Web began to offerunique data collection and analytical research and developmentopportunities. The HTTP-based Web 1.0 systems,characterized by Web search engines such as Google andYahoo and e-commerce businesses such as Amazon andeBay, allow organizations to present their businesses onlineand interact with their customers directly. In addition toporting their traditional RDBMS-based product informationand business contents online, detailed and IP-specific usersearch and interaction logs that are collected seamlesslythrough cookies and server logs have become a new goldmine for understanding customers’ needs and identifying newbusiness opportunities. Web intelligence, web analytics, andthe user-generated content collected through Web 2.0-basedsocial and crowd-sourcing systems (Doan et al. 2011;O’Reilly 2005) have ushered in a new and exciting era ofBI&A 2.0 research in the 2000s, centered on text and webanalytics for unstructured web contents.An immense amount of company, industry, product, andcustomer information can be gathered from the web andorganized and visualized through various text and web miningtechniques. By analyzing customer clickstream data logs,web analytics tools such as Google Analytics can provide atrail of the user’s online activities and reveal the user’sbrowsing and purchasing patterns. Web site design, productplacement optimization, customer transaction analysis, marketstructure analysis, and product recommendations can beaccomplished through web analytics. The many Web 2.0applications developed after 2004 have also created an abundanceof user-generated content from various online socialmedia such as forums, online groups, web blogs, social networkingsites, social multimedia sites (for photos and videos),and even virtual worlds and social games (O’Reilly 2005). Inaddition to capturing celebrity chatter, references to everydayevents, and socio-political sentiments expressed in thesemedia, Web 2.0 applications can efficiently gather a largevolume of timely feedback and opinions from a diversecustomer population for different types of businesses.Many marketing researchers believe that social mediaanalytics presents a unique opportunity for businesses to treatthe market as a “conversation” between businesses andcustomers instead of the traditional business-to-customer,one-way “marketing” (Lusch et al. 2010). Unlike BI&A 1.0technologies that are already integrated into commercialenterprise IT systems, future BI&A 2.0 systems will requirethe integration of mature and scalable techniques in textmining (e.g., information extraction, topic identification,opinion mining, question-answering), web mining, socialnetwork analysis, and spatial-temporal analysis with existingDBMS-based BI&A 1.0 systems.MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 3

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchExcept for basic query and search capabilities, no advancedtext analytics for unstructured content are currently consideredin the 13 capabilities of the Gartner BI platforms.Several, however, are listed in the Gartner BI Hype Cycle,including information semantic services, natural languagequestion answering, and content/text analytics (Bitterer 2011).New IS and CS courses in text mining and web mining haveemerged to address needed technical training.BI&A 3.0Whereas web-based BI&A 2.0 has attracted active researchfrom academia and industry, a new research opportunity inBI&A 3.0 is emerging. As reported prominently in anOctober 2011 article in The Economist (2011), the number ofmobile phones and tablets (about 480 million units) surpassedthe number of laptops and PCs (about 380 million units) forthe first time in 2011. Although the number of PCs in usesurpassed 1 billion in 2008, the same article projected that thenumber of mobile connected devices would reach 10 billionin 2020. Mobile devices such as the iPad, iPhone, and othersmart phones and their complete ecosystems of downloadableapplicationss, from travel advisories to multi-player games,are transforming different facets of society, from education tohealthcare and from entertainment to governments. Othersensor-based Internet-enabled devices equipped with RFID,barcodes, and radio tags (the “Internet of Things”) areopening up exciting new steams of innovative applications.The ability of such mobile and Internet-enabled devices tosupport highly mobile, location-aware, person-centered, andcontext-relevant operations and transactions will continue tooffer unique research challenges and opportunities throughoutthe 2010s. Mobile interface, visualization, and HCI(human–computer interaction) design are also promisingresearch areas. Although the coming of the Web 3.0 (mobileand sensor-based) era seems certain, the underlying mobileanalytics and location and context-aware techniques forcollecting, processing, analyzing and visualizing such largescaleand fluid mobile and sensor data are still unknown.No integrated, commercial BI&A 3.0 systems are foreseen forthe near future. Most of the academic research on mobile BIis still in an embryonic stage. Although not included in thecurrent BI platform core capabilities, mobile BI has beenincluded in the Gartner BI Hype Cycle analysis as one of thenew technologies that has the potential to disrupt the BImarket significantly (Bitterer 2011). The uncertainty associatedwith BI&A 3.0 presents another unique researchdirection for the IS community.Table 1 summarizes the key characteristics of BI&A 1.0, 2.0,and 3.0 in relation to the Gartner BI platforms core capabilitiesand hype cycle.The decade of the 2010s promises to be an exciting one forhigh-impact BI&A research and development for both industryand academia. The business community and industry havealready taken important steps to adopt BI&A for their needs.The IS community faces unique challenges and opportunitiesin making scientific and societal impacts that are relevant andlong-lasting (Chen 2011a). IS research and education programsneed to carefully evaluate future directions, curricula,and action plans, from BI&A 1.0 to 3.0.BI&A Applications: From BigData to Big ImpactSeveral global business and IT trends have helped shape pastand present BI&A research directions. International travel,high-speed network connections, global supply-chain, andoutsourcing have created a tremendous opportunity for ITadvancement, as predicted by Thomas Freeman in his seminalbook, The World is Flat (2005). In addition to ultra-fastglobal IT connections, the development and deployment ofbusiness-related data standards, electronic data interchange(EDI) formats, and business databases and informationsystems have greatly facilitated business data creation andutilization. The development of the Internet in the 1970s andthe subsequent large-scale adoption of the World Wide Websince the 1990s have increased business data generation andcollection speeds exponentially. Recently, the Big Data erahas quietly descended on many communities, from governmentsand e-commerce to health organizations. With anoverwhelming amount of web-based, mobile, and sensorgenerateddata arriving at a terabyte and even exabyte scale(The Economist 2010a, 2010b), new science, discovery, andinsights can be obtained from the highly detailed, contextualized,and rich contents of relevance to any business ororganization.In addition to being data driven, BI&A is highly applied andcan leverage opportunities presented by the abundant data anddomain-specific analytics needed in many critical and highimpactapplication areas. Several of these promising andhigh-impact BI&A applications are presented below, with adiscussion of the data and analytics characteristics, potentialimpacts, and selected illustrative examples or studies: (1) e-commerce and market intelligence, (2) e-government andpolitics 2.0, (3) science and technology, (4) smart health and4 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchTable 1. BI&A Evolution: Key Characteristics and CapabilitiesBI&A 1.0BI&A 2.0BI&A 3.0Key CharacteristicsDBMS-based, structured content• RDBMS & data warehousing• ETL & OLAP• Dashboards & scorecards• Data mining & statistical analysisWeb-based, unstructured content• Information retrieval and extraction• Opinion mining• Question answering• Web analytics and webintelligence• Social media analytics• Social network analysis• Spatial-temporal analysisMobile and sensor-based content• Location-aware analysis• Person-centered analysis• Context-relevant analysis• Mobile visualization & HCIGartner BI Platforms CoreCapabilities• Ad hoc query & search-based BI• Reporting, dashboards & scorecards•OLAP• Interactive visualization• Predictive modeling & data miningGartner Hype Cycle• Column-based DBMS• In-memory DBMS• Real-time decision• Data mining workbenches• Information semanticservices• Natural language questionanswering• Content & text analytics• Mobile BIwell-being, and (5) security and public safety. By carefullyanalyzing the application and data characteristics, researchersand practitioners can then adopt or develop the appropriateanalytical techniques to derive the intended impact. In additionto technical system implementation, significant businessor domain knowledge as well as effective communicationskills are needed for the successful completion of such BI&Aprojects. IS departments thus face unique opportunities andchallenges in developing integrated BI&A research andeducation programs for the new generation of data/analyticssavvyand business-relevant students and professionals (Chen2011a).E-Commerce and Market IntelligenceThe excitement surrounding BI&A and Big Data has arguablybeen generated primarily from the web and e-commercecommunities. Significant market transformation has beenaccomplished by leading e-commerce vendors such Amazonand eBay through their innovative and highly scalable e-commerce platforms and product recommender systems.Major Internet firms such as Google, Amazon, and Facebookcontinue to lead the development of web analytics, cloudcomputing, and social media platforms. The emergence ofcustomer-generated Web 2.0 content on various forums,newsgroups, social media platforms, and crowd-sourcingsystems offers another opportunity for researchers and practitionersto “listen” to the voice of the market from a vastnumber of business constituents that includes customers, employees,investors, and the media (Doan et al. 2011; O’Rielly2005). Unlike traditional transaction records collected fromvarious legacy systems of the 1980s, the data that e-commercesystems collect from the web are less structured and oftencontain rich customer opinion and behavioral information.For social media analytics of customer opinions, text analysisand sentiment analysis techniques are frequently adopted(Pang and Lee 2008). Various analytical techniques have alsobeen developed for product recommender systems, such asassociation rule mining, database segmentation and clustering,anomaly detection, and graph mining (Adomavicius andTuzhilin 2005). Long-tail marketing accomplished byreaching the millions of niche markets at the shallow end ofthe product bitstream has become possible via highly targetedsearches and personalized recommendations (Anderson2004).The Netfix Prize competition 2 for the best collaborativefiltering algorithm to predict user movie ratings helped generatesignificant academic and industry interest in recommendersystems development and resulted in awarding the grand prizeof $1 million to the Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos team, which2 Netflix Prize (http://www.netflixprize.com//community/viewtopic.php?id=1537; accessed July 9, 2012).MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 5

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence Researchsurpassed Netflix’s own algorithm for predicting ratings by10.06 percent. However, the publicity associated with thecompetition also raised major unintended customer privacyconcerns.Much BI&A-related e-commerce research and developmentinformation is appearing in academic IS and CS papers aswell as in popular IT magazines.E-Government and Politics 2.0The advent of Web 2.0 has generated much excitement forreinventing governments. The 2008 U.S. House, Senate, andpresidential elections provided the first signs of success foronline campaigning and political participation. Dubbed“politics 2.0,” politicians use the highly participatory andmultimedia web platforms for successful policy discussions,campaign advertising, voter mobilization, event announcements,and online donations. As government and politicalprocesses become more transparent, participatory, online, andmultimedia-rich, there is a great opportunity for adoptingBI&A research in e-government and politics 2.0 applications.Selected opinion mining, social network analysis, and socialmedia analytics techniques can be used to support onlinepolitical participation, e-democracy, political blogs andforums analysis, e-government service delivery, and processtransparency and accountability (Chen 2009; Chen et al.2007). For e-government applications, semantic informationdirectory and ontological development (as exemplified below)can also be developed to better serve their target citizens.Despite the significant transformational potential for BI&A ine-government research, there has been less academic researchthan, for example, e-commerce-related BI&A research. E-government research often involves researchers from politicalscience and public policy. For example, Karpf (2009) analyzedthe growth of the political blogosphere in the UnitedStates and found significant innovation of existing politicalinstitutions in adopting blogging platforms into their Webofferings. In his research, 2D blogspace mapping with compositerankings helped reveal the partisan makeup of theAmerican political blogsphere. Yang and Callan (2009)demonstrated the value for ontology development for governmentservices through their development of the OntoCopsystem, which works interactively with a user to organize andsummarize online public comments from citizens.Science and TechnologyMany areas of science and technology (S&T) are reaping thebenefits of high-throughput sensors and instruments, fromastrophysics and oceanography, to genomics and environmentalresearch. To facilitate information sharing and dataanalytics, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recentlymandated that every project is required to provide a datamanagement plan. Cyber-infrastructure, in particular, hasbecome critical for supporting such data-sharing initiatives.The 2012 NSF BIGDATA 3 program solicitation is an obviousexample of the U.S. government funding agency’s concertedefforts to promote big data analytics. The programaims to advance the core scientific and technologicalmeans of managing, analyzing, visualizing, and extractinguseful information from large, diverse, distributedand heterogeneous data sets so as to acceleratethe progress of scientific discovery and innovation;lead to new fields of inquiry that would nototherwise be possible; encourage the development ofnew data analytic tools and algorithms; facilitatescalable, accessible, and sustainable data infrastructure;increase understanding of human and socialprocesses and interactions; and promote economicgrowth and improved health and quality of life.Several S&T disciplines have already begun their journeytoward big data analytics. For example, in biology, the NSFfunded iPlant Collaborative 4 is using cyberinfrastructure tosupport a community of researchers, educators, and studentsworking in plant sciences. iPlant is intended to foster a newgeneration of biologists equipped to harness rapidly expandingcomputational techniques and growing data sets toaddress the grand challenges of plant biology. The iPlant dataset is diverse and includes canonical or reference data,experimental data, simulation and model data, observationaldata, and other derived data. It also offers various opensource data processing and analytics tools.In astronomy, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) 5 showshow computational methods and big data can support andfacilitate sense making and decision making at both themacroscopic and the microscopic level in a rapidly growingand globalized research field. The SDSS is one of the mostambitious and influential surveys in the history of astronomy.3 “Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science &Engineering (BIGDATA),” Program Solicitation NSF 12-499 (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12499/nsf12499.htm; accessed August 2, 2012).4 iPlant Collaborative (http://www.iplantcollaborative.org/about; accessedAugust 2, 2012).5 “Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Mapping the Universe” (http://www.sdss.org/;accessed August 2, 2012).6 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchOver its eight years of operation, it has obtained deep, multicolorimages covering more than a quarter of the sky andcreated three-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000galaxies and over 120,000 quasars. Continuing to gather dataat a rate of 200 gigabytes per night, SDSS has amassed morethan 140 terabytes of data. The international Large HadronCollider (LHC) effort for high-energy physics is anotherexample of big data, producing about 13 petabytes of data ina year (Brumfiel 2011).Smart Health and WellbeingMuch like the big data opportunities facing the e-commerceand S&T communities, the health community is facing atsunami of health- and healthcare-related content generatedfrom numerous patient care points of contact, sophisticatedmedical instruments, and web-based health communities.Two main sources of health big data are genomics-driven bigdata (genotyping, gene expression, sequencing data) andpayer–provider big data (electronic health records, insurancerecords, pharmacy prescription, patient feedback andresponses) (Miller 2012a). The expected raw sequencing datafrom each person is approximately four terabytes. From thepayer–provider side, a data matrix might have hundreds ofthousands of patients with many records and parameters(demographics, medications, outcomes) collected over a longperiod of time. Extracting knowledge from health big dataposes significant research and practical challenges, especiallyconsidering the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability andAccountability Act) and IRB (Institutional Review Board)requirements for building a privacy-preserving and trustworthyhealth infrastructure and conducting ethical healthrelatedresearch (Gelfand 2011/2012). Health big data analytics,in general, lags behind e-commerce BI&A applicationsbecause it has rarely taken advantage of scalable analyticalmethods or computational platforms (Miller 2012a).Over the past decade, electronic health records (EHR) havebeen widely adopted in hospitals and clinics worldwide.Significant clinical knowledge and a deeper understanding ofpatient disease patterns can be gleanded from such collections(Hanauer et al. 2009; Hanauer et al. 2011; Lin et al. 2011).Hanauer et al. (2011), for example, used large-scale, longitudinalEHR to research associations in medical diagnosesand consider temporal relations between events to betterelucidate patterns of disease progression. Lin et al. (2011)used symptom–disease–treatment (SDT) association rulemining on a comprehensive EHR of approximately 2.1million records from a major hospital. Based on selectedInternational Classification of Diseases (ICD-9) codes, theywere able to identify clinically relevant and accurate SDTassociations from patient records in seven distinct diseases,ranging from cancers to chronic and infectious diseases.In addition to EHR, health social media sites such as DailyStrength and PatientsLikeMe provide unique research opportunitiesin healthcare decision support and patient empowerment(Miller 2012b), especially for chronic diseases such asdiabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. Associationrule mining and clustering, health social media monitoringand analysis, health text analytics, health ontologies, patientnetwork analysis, and adverse drug side-effect analysis arepromising areas of research in health-related BI&A. Due tothe importance of HIPAA regulations, privacy-preservinghealth data mining is also gaining attention (Gelfand 2011/2012).Partially funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH),the NSF BIGDATA program solicitation includes commoninterests in big data across NSF and NIH. Clinical decisionmaking, patient-centered therapy, and knowledge bases forhealth, disease, genome, and environment are some of theareas in which BI&A techniques can contribute (Chen 2011b;Wactlar et al. 2011). Another recent, major NSF initiativerelated to health big data analytics is the NSF Smart Healthand Wellbeing (SHB) 6 program, which seeks to addressfundamental technical and scientific issues that would supporta much-needed transformation of healthcare from reactive andhospital-centered to preventive, proactive, evidence-based,person-centered, and focused on wellbeing rather than diseasecontrol. The SHB research topics include sensor technology,networking, information and machine learning technology,modeling cognitive processes, system and process modeling,and social and economic issues (Wactlar et al. 2011), most ofwhich are relevant to healthcare BI&A.Security and Public SafetySince the tragic events of September 11, 2001, securityresearch has gained much attention, especially given theincreasing dependency of business and our global society ondigital enablement. Researchers in computational science,information systems, social sciences, engineering, medicine,and many other fields have been called upon to help enhanceour ability to fight violence, terrorism, cyber crimes, and othercyber security concerns. Critical mission areas have beenidentified where information technology can contribute, assuggested in the U.S. Office of Homeland Security’s report“National Strategy for Homeland Security,” released in 2002,including intelligence and warning, border and transportation6 “Smart Health and Wellbeing (SBH),” Program Solicitation NSF 12-512(http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12512/nsf12512.htm; accessed August 2,2012).MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 7

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence Researchsecurity, domestic counter-terrorism, protecting critical infrastructure(including cyberspace), defending against catastrophicterrorism, and emergency preparedness and response.Facing the critical missions of international security andvarious data and technical challenges, the need to develop thescience of “security informatics” was recognized, with itsmain objective being thedevelopment of advanced information technologies,systems, algorithms, and databases for securityrelatedapplications, through an integrated technological,organizational, and policy-based approach(Chen 2006, p. 7).BI&A has much to contribute to the emerging field of securityinformatics.Security issues are a major concern for most organizations.According to the research firm International Data Corporation,large companies are expected to spend $32.8 billion incomputer security in 2012, and small- and medium-sizecompanies will spend more on security than on other ITpurchases over the next three years (Perlroth and Rusli 2012).In academia, several security-related disciplines such ascomputer security, computational criminology, and terrorisminformatics are also flourishing (Brantingham 2011; Chen etal. 2008).Intelligence, security, and public safety agencies are gatheringlarge amounts of data from multiple sources, from criminalrecords of terrorism incidents, and from cyber security threatsto multilingual open-source intelligence. Companies of differentsizes are facing the daunting task of defending againstcybersecurity threats and protecting their intellectual assetsand infrastructure. Processing and analyzing security-relateddata, however, is increasingly difficult. A significant challengein security IT research is the information stovepipe andoverload resulting from diverse data sources, multiple dataformats, and large data volumes. Current research on technologiesfor cybersecurity, counter-terrorism, and crimefightingapplications lacks a consistent framework foraddressing these data challenges. Selected BI&A technologiessuch as criminal association rule mining and clustering,criminal network analysis, spatial-temporal analysis andvisualization, multilingual text analytics, sentiment and affectanalysis, and cyber attacks analysis and attribution should beconsidered for security informatics research.The University of Arizona’s COPLINK and Dark Webresearch programs offer significant examples of crime datamining and terrorism informatics within the IS community(Chen 2006, 2012). The COPLINK information sharing andcrime data mining system, initially developed with fundingfrom NSF and the Department of Justice, is currently in useby more than 4,500 police agencies in the United States andby 25 NATO countries, and was acquired by IBM in 2011.The Dark Web research, funded by NSF and the Departmentof Defense (DOD), has generated one of the largest knownacademic terrorism research databases (about 20 terabytes ofterrorist web sites and social media content) and generatedadvanced multilingual social media analytics techniques.Recognizing the challenges presented by the volume andcomplexity of defense-related big data, the U.S. DefenseAdvanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) within DODinitiated the XDATA program in 2012 to help develop computationaltechniques and software tools for processing andanalyzing the vast amount of mission-oriented information fordefense activities. XDATA aims to address the need forscalable algorithms for processing and visualization ofimperfect and incomplete data. The program engages appliedmathematics, computer science, and data visualization communitiesto develop big data analytics and usability solutionsfor warfighters. 7 BI&A researchers could contribute significantlyin this area.Table 2 summarizes these promising BI&A applications, datacharacteristics, analytics techniques, and potential impacts.BI&A Research Framework:Foundational Technologies andEmerging Research in AnalyticsThe opportunities with the abovementioned emerging andhigh-impact applications have generated a great deal ofexcitement within both the BI&A industry and the researchcommunity. Whereas industry focuses on scalable and integratedsystems and implementations for applications in differentorganizations, the academic community needs tocontinue to advance the key technologies in analytics.Emerging analytics research opportunities can be classifiedinto five critical technical areas—(big) data analytics, textanalytics, web analytics, network analytics, and mobileanalytics—all of which can contribute to to BI&A 1.0, 2.0,and 3.0. The classification of these five topic areas is intended7 “DARPA Calls for Advances in ‘Big Data” to Help the Warfighter,” March29, 2012 (http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/03/29.aspx;accessed August 5, 2012).8 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchTable 2. BI&A Applications: From Big Data to Big ImpactApplicationsE-Commerce andMarket Intelligence• Recommendersystems• Social mediamonitoring andanalysis• Crowd-sourcingsystems• Social and virtualgamesE-Government andPolitics 2.0• Ubiquitousgovernment services• Equal access andpublic services• Citizen engagementand participation• Political campaignand e-pollingScience &Technology• S&T innovation• Hypothesis testing• KnowledgediscoverySmart Health andWellbeing• Human and plantgenomics• Healthcaredecision support• Patient communityanalysisSecurity andPublic Safety• Crime analysis• Computationalcriminology• Terrorisminformatics• Open-sourceintelligence• Cyber securityDataAnalytics• Search and userlogs• Customer transactionrecords• CustomergeneratedcontentCharacteristics:Structured webbased,usergeneratedcontent,rich network information,unstructuredinformal customeropinions• Association rulemining• Database segmentationandclustering• Anomaly detection• Graph mining• Social networkanalysis• Text and webanalytics• Sentiment andaffect analysis• Government informationand services• Rules and regulations• Citizen feedback andcommentsCharacteristics:Fragmented informationsources andlegacy systems, richtextual content,unstructured informalcitizen conversations• Information integration• Content and textanalytics• Government informationsemantic servicesand ontologies• Social media monitoringand analysis• Social networkanalysis• Sentiment and affectanalysis• S&T instrumentsand systemgenerateddata• Sensor andnetwork contentCharacteristics:High-throughputinstrument-baseddata collection, finegrainedmultiplemodalityand largescalerecords, S&Tspecific data formats• S&T baseddomain-specificmathematical andanalytical models• Genomics andsequence data• Electronic healthrecords (EHR)• Health and patientsocial mediaCharacteristics:Disparate but highlylinked content,person-specificcontent, HIPAA, IRBand ethics issues• Genomics andsequence analysisand visualization• EHR associationmining andclustering• Health socialmedia monitoringand analysis• Health textanalytics• Health ontologies• Patient networkanalysis• Adverse drugside-effectanalysis• Privacy-preservingdata mining• Criminal records• Crime maps• Criminal networks• News and webcontents• Terrorism incidentdatabases• Viruses, cyberattacks, andbotnetsCharacteristics:Personal identityinformation, incompleteand deceptivecontent, rich groupand network information,multilingualcontent• Criminalassociation rulemining andclustering• Criminal networkanalysis• Spatial-temporalanalysis andvisualization• Multilingual textanalytics• Sentiment andaffect analysis• Cyber attacksanalysis andattributionImpactsLong-tail marketing,targeted and personalizedrecommendation,increased saleand customersatisfactionTransforming governments,empoweringcitizens, improvingtransparency, participation,and equalityS&T advances,scientific impactImproved healthcarequality, improvedlong-term care,patient empowermentImproved publicsafety and securityMIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 9

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchTable 3. BI&A Research Framework: Foundational Technologies and Emerging Research in AnalyticsFoundationalTechnologiesEmergingResearch(Big) Data Analytics Text Analytics Web Analytics Network Analytics Mobile Analytics• RDBMS• data warehousing• ETL• OLAP• BPM• data mining• clustering• regression• classification• associationanalysis• anomaly detection• neural networks• genetic algorithms• multivariatestatistical analysis• optimization• heuristic search• statistical machinelearning• sequential andtemporal mining• spatial mining• mining high-speeddata streams andsensor data• process mining• privacy-preservingdata mining• network mining• web mining• column-basedDBMS• in-memory DBMS• parallel DBMS• cloud computing• Hadoop• MapReduce• informationretrieval• documentrepresentation• query processing• relevance feedback• user models• search engines• enterprise searchsystems• statistical NLP• informationextraction• topic models• question-answeringsystems• opinion mining• sentiment/affectanalysis• web stylometricanalysis• multilingualanalysis• text visualization• multimedia IR• mobile IR• Hadoop• MapReduce• informationretrieval• computationallinguistics• search engines• web crawling• web site ranking• search log analysis• recommendersystems• web services• mashups• cloud services• cloud computing• social search andmining• reputation systems• social mediaanalytics• web visualization• web-basedauctions• internetmonetization• social marketing• web privacy/security• bibliometricanalysis• citation network• coauthorshipnetwork• social networktheories• network metricsand topology• mathematicalnetwork models• networkvisualization• link mining• communitydetection• dynamic networkmodeling• agent-basedmodeling• social influenceand informationdiffusion models• ERGMs• virtual communities• criminal/darknetworks• social/politicalanalysis• trust and reputation• web services• smartphoneplatforms• mobile webservices• mobile pervasiveapps• mobile sensingapps• mobile socialinnovation• mobile socialnetworking• mobile visualization/HCI• personalization andbehavioralmodeling• gamification• mobile advertisingand marketingto highlight the key characteristics of each area; however, afew of these areas may leverage similar underlying technologies.In each analytics area we present the foundationaltechnologies that are mature and well developed and suggestselected emerging research areas (see Table 3).(Big) Data AnalyticsData analytics refers to the BI&A technologies that aregrounded mostly in data mining and statistical analysis. Asmentioned previously, most of these techniques rely on themature commercial technologies of relational DBMS, datawarehousing, ETL, OLAP, and BPM (Chaudhuri et al. 2011).Since the late 1980s, various data mining algorithms havebeen developed by researchers from the artificial intelligence,algorithm, and database communities. In the IEEE 2006International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), the 10most influential data mining algorithms were identified basedon expert nominations, citation counts, and a communitysurvey. In ranked order, they are C4.5, k-means, SVM(support vector machine), Apriori, EM (expectation maximization),PageRank, AdaBoost, kNN (k-nearest neighbors),Naïve Bayes, and CART (Wu et al. 2007). These algorithmscover classification, clustering, regression, association analysis,and network analysis. Most of these popular data miningalgorithms have been incorporated in commercial and opensource data mining systems (Witten et al. 2011). Other10 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence Researchadvances such as neural networks for classification/predictionand clustering and genetic algorithms for optimization andmachine learning have all contributed to the success of datamining in different applications.Two other data analytics approaches commonly taught inbusiness school are also critical for BI&A. Grounded instatistical theories and models, multivariate statistical analysiscovers analytical techniques such as regression, factor analysis,clustering, and discriminant analysis that have been usedsuccessfully in various business applications. Developed inthe management science community, optimization techniquesand heuristic search are also suitable for selected BI&A problemssuch as database feature selection and web crawling/spidering. Most of these techniques can be found in businessschool curricula.Due to the success achieved collectively by the data miningand statistical analysis community, data analytics continues tobe an active area of research. Statistical machine learning,often based on well-grounded mathematical models andpowerful algorithms, techniques such as Bayesian networks,Hidden Markov models, support vector machine, reinforcementlearning, and ensemble models, have been applied todata, text, and web analytics applications. Other new dataanalytics techniques explore and leverage unique data characteristics,from sequential/temporal mining and spatial mining,to data mining for high-speed data streams and sensor data.Increased privacy concerns in various e-commerce, e-government, and healthcare applications have caused privacypreservingdata mining to become an emerging area ofresearch. Many of these methods are data-driven, relying onvarious anonymization techniques, while others are processdriven,defining how data can be accessed and used (Gelfand2011/ 2012). Over the past decade, process mining has alsoemerged as a new research field that focuses on the analysisof processes using event data. Process mining has becomepossible due to the availability of event logs in variousindustries (e.g., healthcare, supply chains) and new processdiscovery and conformance checking techniques (van derAalst 2012). Furthermore, network data and web content havehelped generate exciting research in network analytics andweb analytics, which are presented below.In addition to active academic research on data analytics,industry research and development has also generated muchexcitement, especially with respect to big data analytics forsemi-structured content. Unlike the structured data that canbe handled repeatedly through a RDBMS, semi-structureddata may call for ad hoc and one-time extraction, parsing,processing, indexing, and analytics in a scalable and distributedMapReduce or Hadoop environment. MapReducehas been hailed as a revolutionary new platform for largescale,massively parallel data access (Patterson 2008).Inspired in part by MapReduce, Hadoop provides a Javabasedsoftware framework for distributed processing of dataintensivetransformation and analytics. The top three commercialdatabase suppliers—Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft—have all adopted Hadoop, some within a cloud infrastructure.The open source Apache Hadoop has also gained significanttraction for business analytics, including Chukwa for datacollection, HBase for distributed data storage, Hive for datasummarization and ad hoc querying, and Mahout for datamining (Henschen 2011). In their perspective paper, Stonebrakeret al. (2010) compared MapReduce with the parallelDBMS. The commercial parallel DBMS showed clear advantagesin efficient query processing and high-level querylanguage and interface, whereas MapReduce excelled in ETLand analytics for “read only” semi-structured data sets. NewHadoop- and MapReduce-based systems have becomeanother viable option for big data analytics in addition to thecommercial systems developed for RDBMS, column-basedDBMS, in-memory DBMS, and parallel DBMS (Chaudhuriet al. 2011).Text AnalyticsA significant portion of the unstructured content collected byan organization is in textual format, from e-mail communicationand corporate documents to web pages and socialmedia content. Text analytics has its academic roots ininformation retrieval and computational linguistics. In informationretrieval, document representation and query processingare the foundations for developing the vector-spacemodel, Boolean retrieval model, and probabilistic retrievalmodel, which in turn, became the basis for the modern digitallibraries, search engines, and enterprise search systems(Salton 1989). In computational linguistics, statistical naturallanguage processing (NLP) techniques for lexical acquisition,word sense disambiguation, part-of-speech-tagging (POST),and probabilistic context-free grammars have also becomeimportant for representing text (Manning and Schütze 1999).In addition to document and query representations, usermodels and relevance feedback are also important inenhancing search performance.Since the early 1990s, search engines have evolved intomature commercial systems, consisting of fast, distributedcrawling; efficient inverted indexing; inlink-based pageranking; and search logs analytics. Many of these foundationaltext processing and indexing techniques have beendeployed in text-based enterprise search and documentmanagement systems in BI&A 1.0.MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 11

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchLeveraging the power of big data (for training) and statisticalNLP (for building language models), text analytics techniqueshave been actively pursued in several emerging areas,including information extraction, topic models, questionanswering(Q/A), and opinion mining. Information extractionis an area of research that aims to automatically extractspecific kinds of structured information from documents. Asa building block of information extraction, NER (namedentity recognition, also known as entity extraction) is aprocess that identifies atomic elements in text and classifiesthem into predefined categories (e.g., names, places, dates).NER techniques have been successfully developed for newsanalysis and biomedical applications. Topic models are algorithmsfor discovering the main themes that pervade a largeand otherwise unstructured collection of documents. Newtopic modeling algorithms such as LDA (latent Dirichletallocation) and other probabilistic models have attractedrecent research (Blei 2012). Question answering (Q/A) systemsrely on techniques from NLP, information retrieval, andhuman–computer interaction. Primarily designed to answerfactual questions (i.e., who, what, when, and where kinds ofquestions), Q/A systems involve different techniques forquestion analysis, source retrieval, answer extraction, andanswer presentation (Maybury 2004). The recent successesof IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri have highlighted Q/Aresearch and commercialization opportunities. Many promisingQ/A system application areas have been identified,including education, health, and defense. Opinion miningrefers to the computational techniques for extracting, classifying,understanding, and assessing the opinions expressed invarious online news sources, social media comments, andother user-generated contents. Sentiment analysis is oftenused in opinion mining to identify sentiment, affect, subjectivity,and other emotional states in online text. Web 2.0 andsocial media content have created abundant and excitingopportunities for understanding the opinions of the generalpublic and consumers regarding social events, political movements,company strategies, marketing campaigns, and productpreferences (Pang and Lee 2008).In addition to the above research directions, text analytics alsooffers significant research opportunities and challenges inseveral more focused areas, including web stylometricanalysis for authorship attribution, multilingual analysis forweb documents, and large-scale text visualization. Multimediainformation retrieval and mobile information retrievalare two other related areas that require support of textanalytics techniques, in addition to the core multimedia andmobile technologies. Similar to big data analytics, textanalytics using MapReduce, Hadoop, and cloud services willcontinue to foster active research directions in both academiaand industry.Web AnalyticsOver the past decade, web analytics has emerged as an activefield of research within BI&A. Building on the data miningand statistical analysis foundations of data analytics and onthe information retrieval and NLP models in text analytics,web analytics offers unique analytical challenges andopportunities. HTTP/HTML-based hyperlinked web sites andassociated web search engines and directory systems forlocating web content have helped develop unique Internetbasedtechnologies for web site crawling/spidering, web pageupdating, web site ranking, and search log analysis. Web loganalysis based on customer transactions has subsequentlyturned into active research in recommender systems. However,web analytics has become even more exciting with thematurity and popularity of web services and Web 2.0 systemsin the mid-2000s (O’Reilly 2005).Based on XML and Internet protocols (HTTP, SMTP), webservices offer a new way of reusing and integrating third partyor legacy systems. New types of web services and theirassociated APIs (application programming interface) allowdevelopers to easily integrate diverse content from differentweb-enabled system, for example, REST (representationalstate transfer) for invoking remote services, RSS (reallysimple syndication) for news “pushing,” JSON (JavaScriptobject notation) for lightweight data-interchange, and AJAX(asynchronous JavaScript + XML) for data interchange anddynamic display. Such lightweight programming modelssupport data syndication and notification and “mashups” ofmultimedia content (e.g., Flickr, Youtube, Google Maps)from different web sources—a process somewhat similar toETL (extraction, transformation, and load) in BI&A 1.0.Most of the e-commerce vendors have provided mature APIsfor accessing their product and customer content (Schonfeld2005). For example, through Amazon Web Services, developerscan access product catalog, customer reviews, siteranking, historical pricing, and the Amazon Elastic ComputeCloud (EC2) for computing capacity. Similarly, Google webAPIs support AJAX search, Map API, GData API (forCalendar, Gmail, etc.), Google Translate, and Google AppEngine for cloud computing resources. Web services andAPIs continue to provide an exciting stream of new datasources for BI&A 2.0 research.A major emerging component in web analytics research is thedevelopment of cloud computing platforms and services,which include applications, system software, and hardwaredelivered as services over the Internet. Based on serviceorientedarchitecture (SOA), server virtualization, and utilitycomputing, cloud computing can be offered as software as a12 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence Researchservice (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or platformas a service (PaaS). Only a few leading IT vendors are currentlypositioned to support high-end, high-throughput BI&Aapplications using cloud computing. For example, AmazonElastic Compute Cloud (EC2) enables users to rent virtualcomputers on which to run their own computer applications.Its Simple Storage Service (S3) provides online storage webservice. Google App Engine provides a platform for developingand hosting Java or Python-based web applications.Google Bigtable is used for backend data storage. Microsoft’sWindows Azure platform provides cloud services such asSQL Azure and SharePoint, and allows .Net frameworkapplications to run on the platform. The industry-led web andcloud services offer unique data collection, processing, andanalytics challenges for BI&A researchers.In academia, current web analytics related research encompassessocial search and mining, reputation systems, socialmedia analytics, and web visualization. In addition, webbasedauctions, Internet monetization, social marketing, andweb privacy/security are some of the promising researchdirections related to web analytics. Many of these emergingresearch areas may rely on advances in social network analysis,text analytics, and even economics modeling research.Network AnalyticsNetwork analytics is a nascent research area that has evolvedfrom the earlier citation-based bibliometric analysis to includenew computational models for online community and socialnetwork analysis. Grounded in bibliometric analysis, citationnetworks and coauthorship networks have long been adoptedto examine scientific impact and knowledge diffusion. Theh-index is a good example of a citation metric that aims tomeasure the productivity and impact of the published work ofa scientist or scholar (Hirsch 2005). Since the early 2000s,network science has begun to advance rapidly with contributionsfrom sociologists, mathematicians, and computerscientists. Various social network theories, network metrics,topology, and mathematical models have been developed thathelp understand network properties and relationships (e.g.,centrality, betweenness, cliques, paths; ties, structural holes,structural balance; random network, small-world network,scale-free network) (Barabási 2003; Watts 2003).Recent network analytics research has focused on areas suchas link mining and community detection. In link mining, oneseeks to discover or predict links between nodes of a network.Within a network, nodes may represent customers, end users,products and/or services, and the links between nodes mayrepresent social relationships, collaboration, e-mail exchanges,or product adoptions. One can conduct link mining usingonly the topology information (Liben-Nowell and Kleinberg2007). Techniques such as common neighbors, Jaccard’scoefficient, Adamic Adar measure, and Katz measure arepopular for predicting missing or future links. The linkmining accuracy can be further improved when the node andlink attributes are considered. Community detection is also anactive research area of relevance to BI&A (Fortunato 2010).By representing networks as graphs, one can apply graphpartitioning algorithms to find a minimal cut to obtain densesubgraphs representing user communities.Many techniques have been developed to help study thedynamic nature of social networks. For example, agent-basedmodels (sometimes referred to as multi-agent systems) havebeen used to study disease contact networks and criminal orterrorist networks (National Research Council 2008). Suchmodels simulate the actions and interactions of autonomousagents (of either individual or collective entities such asorganizations or groups) with the intent of assessing theireffects on the system as a whole. Social influence and informationdiffusion models are also viable techniques forstudying evolving networks. Some research is particularlyrelevant to opinion and information dynamics of a society.Such dynamics hold many qualitative similarities to diseaseinfections (Bettencourt et al. 2006). Another networkanalytics technique that has drawn attention in recent years isthe use of exponential random graph models (Frank andStrauss 1986; Robins et al. 2007). ERGMs are a family ofstatistical models for analyzing data about social and othernetworks. To support statistical inference on the processesinfluencing the formation of network structure, ERGMsconsider the set of all possible alternative networks weightedon their similarity to an observed network. In addition tostudying traditional friendship or disease networks, ERGMsare promising for understanding the underlying networkpropertities that cause the formation and evolution ofcustomer, citizen, or patient networks for BI&A.Most of the abovementioned network analytics techniques arenot part of the existing commercial BI&A platforms. Significantopen-source development efforts are underway from thesocial network analysis community. Tools such as UCINet(Borgatti et al. 2002) and Pajek (Batagelj and Mrvar 1998)have been developed and are widely used for large-scalenetwork analysis and visualization. New network analyticstools such as ERGM have also been made available to theacademic community (Hunter et al. 2008). Online virtualcommunities, criminal and terrorist networks, social andpolitical networks, and trust and reputation networks are someof the promising new applications for network analytics.MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 13

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchMobile AnalyticsAs an effective channel for reaching many users and as ameans of increasing the productivity and efficiency of anorganization’s workforce, mobile computing is viewed byrespondents of the recent IBM technology trends survey (IBM2011) as the second most “in demand” area for softwaredevelopment. Mobile BI was also considered by the GartnerBI Hype Cycle analysis as one of the new technologies thathave the potential to drastically disrupt the BI market (Bitterer2011). According to eMarketer, the market for mobile ads isexpected to explode, soaring from an estimated $2.6 billion in2012 to $10.8 billion in 2016 (Snider 2012).Mobile computing offers a means for IT professional growthas more and more organizations build applications. With itslarge and growing global install base, Android has beenranked as the top mobile platform since 2010. This opensource platform, based on Java and XML, offers a muchshorter learning curve and this contributes to its popularitywith IT professionals: 70 percent of the IBM surveyrespondents planned to use Android as their mobile developmentplatform, while 49 percent planned to use iOS and 35percent planned to use Windows 7. The ability to collect finegrained,location-specific, context-aware, highly personalizedcontent through these smart devices has opened new possibilitiesfor advanced and innovative BI&A opportunities. Inaddition to the hardware and content advantages, the uniqueapps ecosystem developed through the volunteer communityof mobile app developers offers a new avenue for BI&Aresearch. The Apple App Store alone offers more than500,000 apps in almost any conceivable category as of August2012; 8 the number of Android apps also reached 500,000 inAugust 2012. 9 Many different revenue models have begun toemerge for mobile apps, from paid or free but ad-supportedapps to mobile gamification, which incentivizes participants(e.g., users or employees) by giving rewards for contributions(Snider 2012). For mobile BI, companies are consideringenterprise apps, industry-specific apps, e-commerce apps, andsocial apps (in ranked order) according to the IBM survey.The lightweight programming models of the current webservices (e.g., HTML, XML, CSS, Ajax, Flash, J2E) and thematuring mobile development platforms such as Android andiOS have contributed to the rapid development of mobile webservices (e.g., HTML5, Mobile Ajax, Mobile Flash, J2ME) in8 Apple – iPhone 5 – Learn about apps from the App store (http://www.apple.com/iphone/built-in-apps/app-store.html; accessed August 8, 2012).9 AppBrain, Android Statistics (http://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-ofandroid-apps;accessed August 8, 2012).various mobile pervasive applications, from disaster managementto healthcare support. New mobile analytics research isemerging in different areas (e.g., mobile sensing apps that arelocation-aware and activity-sensitive; mobile social innovationfor m-health and m-learning; mobile social networkingand crowd-sourcing; mobile visualization/HCI; and personalizationand behavioral modeling for mobile apps). In addition,social, behavioral, and economic models for gamification,mobile advertising, and social marketing are under way andmay contribute to the development of future BI&A 3.0systems.Mapping the BI&A KnowledgeLandscape: A Bibliometric Study ofAcademic and Industry PublicationsIn an effort to better understand the current state of BI&Arelated research and identify future sources of knowledge, weconducted a bibliometric study analyzing relevant literature,major BI&A scholars, disciplines and publications, and keyresearch topics. A collection, transformation, and analyticsprocess was followed in the study, much like a typical BI&Aprocess adopted in other applications.To discern research trends in BI&A, related literature fromthe past decade (2000–2011) was collected. Relevant ITpublications were identified from several large-scale andreputable digital libraries: Web of Science (ThomsonReuters, covering more than 12,000 of the highest impactjournals in sciences, engineering, and humanities), BusinessSource Complete (EBSCO, covering peer-reviewed businessjournals as well as non-journal content such as industry/trademagazines), IEEE Xplore (Institute of Electrical and ElectronicsEngineers, providing access to the IEEE digitallibrary), ScienceDirect (Elsevier, covering over 2,500 journalsfrom the scientific, technical, and medical literature), andEngineering Village (Elsevier, used to retrieve selected ACMconference papers because the ACM Digital Library interfacedoes not support automated downloading). These sourcescontain high-quality bibliometric metadata, including journalname and date, author name and institution, and article titleand abstract.To ensure data consistency and relevance across our collection,we retrieved only those publications that contained thekeywords business intelligence, business analytics, or bigdata within their title, abstract, or subject indexing (whenapplicable). The choice of these three keywords was intendedto focus our search and analysis on publications of direct relevanceto our interest. However, this search procedure may14 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchKeywordAllYears 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011Business Intelligence 3,146 113 104 146 159 229 330 346 394 352 201 334 338Business Analytics 213 0 5 43 4 5 2 9 6 19 16 17 126Big Data 243 0 1 0 0 7 4 3 26 11 41 44 95Total 3,602 113 110 149 163 241 336 358 426 382 358 356 560Figure 2. BI&A Related Publication Trend from 2000 to 2011also omit articles that use other BI&A relevant terms (e.g.,data warehousing, data mining) but not the three specifickeywords in the title or abstract. This kind of limitation iscommon in bibliometric studies. The collected data wasexported as XML records and parsed into a relational database(SQL Server) for analysis. The number of recordsinitially retrieved totaled 6,187 papers. After removing duplicates,the number of unique records totaled 3,602.Figure 2 shows the statistics and growth trends of publicationsrelating to the three search keywords. Overall, business intelligencehad the largest coverage and the longest history. Thisis consistent with the evolution of BI&A, as the term BIappeared first in the early 1990s. In our collection, businessanalytics and big data began to appear in the literature in2001, but only gained much attention after about 2007. Thebusiness intelligence related publications numbered 3,146,whereas business analytics and big data publications eachnumbered only 213 and 243, respectively. While the overallpublication trend for business intelligence remains stable,business analytics and big data publications have seen a fastergrowth pattern in recent years.Knowledge of the most popular publications, as well as prolificauthors, is beneficial for understanding an emergingresearch discipline. Table 4 summarizes the top 20 journals,conferences, and industry magazines with BI&A publications.(The top 20 academic BI&A authors are identified in Table 6.)Overall, the largest source of academic business intelligencepublications was academic conferences. The Conference onBusiness Intelligence and Financial Engineering (#1) andConference on Electronic Commerce and Business Intelligence(#3) are specialized academic conferences devoted tobusiness intelligence. One IS conference ranks #2 in the top-20 list: Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences(HICSS), with 370 publications. 10 IEEE holds the majority ofconferences on the list through various outlets; several arerelated to emerging technical areas, such as data mining,Internet computing, and cloud computing. The IEEE InternationalConference on Data Mining (ICDM) is highlyregarded and ranks #5. ACM has two publications in the top-20 list: Communications of the ACM and the ACM SIGKDDInternational Conference on Knowledge Discovery and DataMining. Both are well-known in CS. Again, the data miningcommunity has contributed significantly to BI&A. Othertechnical conferences in CS are also contributing to BI&A inareas such as computational intelligence, web intelligence,evolutionary computation, and natural language processing,all of which are critical for developing future data, text, andweb analytics techniques discussed in our research frame-10 Two major IS conferences, ICIS (International Conference on InformationSystems) and WITS (Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems)may have also published significant BI&A research; however, their collectionsare not covered in the five major digital libraries to which we haveaccess and thus are not included in this analysis.MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 15

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchTable 4. Top Journals, Conferences, and Industry Magazines with BI&A PublicationsTop20 Academic Publication PublicationsTop20 Industry Publication Publications1 Conf. on Business Intelligence and Financial Engineering 531 1 ComputerWorld 2822 Hawaii International Conf. on Systems Sciences 370 2 Information Today 2583 Conf. on Electronic Commerce and Business Intelligence 252 3 InformationWeek 2294International Conf. on Web Intelligence and Intelligent AgentTechnology Workshops151 4 Computer Weekly 1995 IEEE International Conf. on Data Mining 150 5 Microsoft Data Mining 1086IEEE International Conf. on e-Technology, e-Commerce, ande-Service129 6 InfoWorld 867 IEEE Intelligent Systems 47 7 CIO 718 IEEE Cloud Computing 44 8 KM World 619 Decision Support Systems 39 9CRN (formerlyVARBusiness)5910 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 39 10 Stores Magazine 5611 Journal of Business Ethics 34 11 Forbes 4512 Communications of the ACM 33 12 CRM Magazine 4013 European Journal of Marketing 32 13 Network World 3914IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, andGrid Computing15 International Journal of Technology Management 29 1531 14 Financial Executive 37Healthcare FinancialManagement16ACM SIGKDD International Conf. on Knowledge Discoveryand Data Mining28 16 Chain Store Age 4017 International Symposium on Natural Language Processing 22 17 Strategic Finance 2918 IEEE Internet Computing 21 18 Traffic World 2819International Conf. on Computational Intelligence and SoftwareEngineering21 19 Data Strategy 2720 IEEE Software 20 20 CFO 2533work. Journals are somewhat more limited in their publicationvolume, although it is notable that the IS journalDecision Support Systems made the top 20 list (at #9). A fewbusiness school journals also contain related BI&A researchin areas such as business ethics, marketing, and technologymanagement. Other major IS publications also publishedbusiness intelligence related articles, but at a lower rate thanthe aforementioned sources (see Table 5). Relevant sourcesfrom industry tend to be general IT publications, without aspecific BI focus (e.g., ComputerWorld at #1, InformationToday at #2, and InformationWeek at #3), as shown inTable 4. However, there are some focused sources as well,such as Microsoft Data Mining (#5), KM World (#8), andCRM Magazine (#12), that are more relevant to the BI&Arelated topics of data mining, knowledge management, andcustomer relation management. KM and CRM have traditionallybeen topics of interest to IS scholars.Table 6 summarizes the top-20 academic authors with BI&Apublications. Most of these authors are from IS and CS, withseveral others from the related fields of marketing, management,communication, and mathematics. Many of theseauthors are close collaborators, for example, Hsinchun Chen(#1), Jay F. Nunamaker (#18), Michael Chau (#11), andWingyan Chung (#18) through the University of Arizonaconnection, 11 and Barabara H. Wixom (#5) and Hugh J.Watson (#5) through the University of Georgia connection.We also report the PageRank score (Brin and Page 1998), apopular metric for data and network analytics, for the BI&Aauthors based on the coauthorship network within BI&Apublications. A higher PageRank score captures an author’spropensity to collaborate with other prolific authors. The11 Readers are welcome to contact the authors for validation of our data setand results or for additional analysis.16 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchTable 5. Major IS Journals with BI&A PublicationsAcademic PublicationPublicationsDecision Support Systems 41Communications of the AIS 19Journal of Management Information Systems 12Management Science 10Information Systems Research 9Journal of the Association for Information Systems 5INFORMS Journal on Computing 4Management Information Systems Quarterly 2Table 6. Top Academic Authors in BI&ARank Name Affiliation Discipline Region Total PageRank1 Hsinchun Chen University of Arizona, U.S. IS North America 19 7.4712 Shenghong Li Zhejiang University, China Math Asia 16 4.2763 Yong Shi University of Nebraska, U.S. CS North America 15 3.7084 Kin Keung Lai City University of Hong Kong, China IS Asia 14 4.7805 Barbara H. Wixom University of Virginia, U.S. IS North America 8 2.7275 Hugh J. Watson University of Georgia, U.S. IS North America 8 2.4855 Elizabeth Chang Curtin University, Australia IS Australia 8 2.3815 Sheila Wright De Montfort University, U.K. Marketing Europe 8 2.8595 Matteo Golfarelli University of Bologna, Italy CS Europe 8 1.7855 Farookh Hussain University of Technology Sydney, Australia CS Australia 8 1.26411 Michael Chau Hong Kong University, China IS Asia 7 1.78811 Josef Schiefer Vienna University of Technology, Austria CS Europe 7 2.73111 Craig S. Fleisher College of Costal Georgia, U.S. Management North America 7 1.04214 Lingling Zhang Towson University, U.S. Communication North America 6 2.32814 Olivera Marjanovic University of Sydney, Australia IS Australia 6 2.46416 Xiaofeng Zhang Changsha University of Science andTechnology, ChinaIS Asia 5 2.39316 Stefano Rizzi University of Bologna, Italy CS Europe 5 1.68318 Jay F. Nunamaker University of Arizona, U.S. IS North America 4 2.79218 Wingyan Chung Santa Clara University, U.S. IS North America 4 1.76118 Zahir Urabu Brunel University, U.K. Management Europe 4 2.241analysis reveals broad and even contribution of authors fromNorth America, Asia, Europe, and Australia, reflecting thediversity and international interest in the field of BI&A.The last set of analyses investigated the content of BI&Apublications from 2000–2011. Mallet (McCallum 2002), aJava-based open-source NLP text analytics tool, was used toextract the top bigrams (two-word phrases) for each year. Afew bi-grams were combined to form more meaningful BIrelatedtrigrams such as “customer relation management” and“enterprise resource planning.” These keywords were thenranked based on their frequency, and the top 30 keywordsdisplayed using the tagcloud visualization. More importantkeywords are highlighted with larger fonts as shown inFigure 3. For example, competitive advantage, big data, datawarehousing, and decision support emerged as the top fourtopics in the BI&A literature. Other BI&A related topics suchas customer relation management, data mining, competitiveMIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 17

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchFigure 3. Tagcloud Visualization of Major Topics in the BI&A Literatureintelligence, enterprise resource planning, and knowledgemanagement were also highly ranked. Overall, the topicsextracted were highly relevant to BI&A, especially for itsmanagerial and application values, although most of thedetailed technical terms, as described in the previous researchframework sections, were not present. This could be attributedto the tendency of authors to use broad terminologies inarticle titles and abstracts.BI&A Education and ProgramDevelopmentBI&A provides opportunities not only for the research community,but also for education and program development. InJuly 2012, Columbia University and New York Cityannounced plans to invest over $80 million dollars in a newCenter for Data Science, which is expected to generatethousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenues from100 startup companies over the next 10 years (AssociatedPress 2012). BI&A is data science in business. Job postingsseeking data scientists and business analytics specialistsabound these days. There is a clear shortage of professionalswith the “deep” knowledge required to manage the three V’sof big data: volume, velocity, and variety (Russom 2011).There is also an increasing demand for individuals with thedeep knowledge needed to manage the three “perspectives” ofbusiness decision making: descriptive, predictive, and prescriptiveanalytics. In this section, we describe BI&A educationin business schools, present the challenges facing ISdepartments, and discuss BI&A program development opportunities.We also provide some suggestions for the IS disciplinein addressing these challenges (Chiang et al. 2012).Education ChallengesBI&A focuses on understanding, interpretation, strategizing,and taking action to further organizational interests. Severalacademic disciplines have contributed to BI&A, including IS,CS, Statistics, Management, and Marketing, as shown in ourbibliometric study. IS programs, in particular, are uniquelypositioned to train a new generation of scholars and studentsdue to their emphasis on key data management and informationtechnologies, business-oriented statistical analysis andmanagement science techniques, and broad business disciplineexposure (e.g., Finance, Accounting, Marketing, andEconomics).Since its inception approximately 45 years ago, IS as anacademic discipline has primarily focused on business needsin an era when the major challenges involved the managementof internal business and transaction data. In the age of bigdata, these problems remain, but the emphasis in industry hasshifted to data analysis and rapid business decision makingbased on huge volumes of information. Such time-criticaldecision making largely takes place outside of the IS function(i.e., in business units such as marketing, finance, andlogistics). Can IS programs serve the needs of these businessdecision makers? Can we provide courses in data mining,text mining, opinion mining, social media/network analytics,web mining, and predictive analytics that are required formarketing and finance majors? We should also ask ourselvesabout the skill sets needed by students. Should we recruitstudents with strong math and statistical skills, for example?We contend that a new vision for IS, or at least for some ISprograms, should address these questions.BI&A presents a unique opportunity for IS units in businessschools to position themselves as a viable option for edu-18 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence Researchcating professionals with the necessary depth and academicrigor to tackle the increased complexity of BI&A issues. ISprograms housed within business schools have access to avariety of business courses, as well as courses intended toimprove communication and presentation skills. It is alsocommon for business schools to house management scienceand statistics faculty in the same IS unit.BI&A Knowledge and SkillsBI&A education should be interdisciplinary and cover criticalanalytical and IT skills, business and domain knowledge, andcommunication skills required in a complex data-centricbusiness environment.Analytical and IT skills include a variety of evolving topics.They are drawn from disciplines such as statistics andcomputer science for managing and analyzing both structureddata and unstructured text. Coverage of these topics rangesfrom BI&A 1.0 to BI&A 3.0. The academic programsintended to produce BI&A professionals should considerthese analytical and IT skills as suggested in Table 3 of ourresearch framework.To provide useful insights and decision-making support, theBI&A professionals must be capable of understanding thebusiness issues and framing the appropriate analytical solutions.The necessary business knowledge for BI&A professionalsranges from general familiarity with the areas ofAccounting, Finance, Management, Marketing, Logistics, andOperation Management, to the domain knowledge required inspecific BI&A applications, some of which are discussedearlier and summarized in Table 2.The importance of an organization-wide culture for informedfact-based decision making for business analytics is emphasizedby Davenport (2006). To support such a culture, BI&Aprofessionals need to know not only how to turn raw data andinformation (through analytics) into meaningful and actionableknowledge for an organization, but also how to properlyinteract with and communicate this knowledge to the businessand domain experts of the organization.Program DevelopmentBI&A provides a unique opportunity for IS units in businessschools to develop new courses, certificate programs, anddegree programs charged with preparing the next generationof analytical thinkers. There are many options for deliveringBI&A education. Because of the depth of knowledgerequired, graduate programs are the obvious choice. Viableprogram development options in delivering BI&A educationinclude• creating a Master of Science (MS) degree in BI&A• creating a BI&A concentration in existing MS ISprograms• offering a graduate BI&A certificate programThe first option requires the effort of developing a newprogram. A few universities have embarked on this endeavor.A nonexhaustive list includes North Carolina State University,Saint Joseph’s University, Northwestern University, theUniversity of Denver, Stevens Institute of Technology, andFordham University. New York University will launch itsnew program in May 2013. New MS degree programs can bedesigned explicitly to attract analytically strong students withundergraduate degrees in areas such as mathematics, science,and computer science, and to prepare these students forcareers, not only in the IS or IT groups in industry, but also infunctional areas such as research and development, marketing,media, logistics, and finance.The second option leverages existing MS IS programs with aBI&A concentration that would supplement the alreadyexisting curriculum in IT, data management, and business andcommunication courses with additional analytics coverage.This option has been adopted by a number of schoolsincluding the IS departments at Carnegie Mellon Universityand the University of Arizona. This option provides BI&Aknowledge and skills for students who will primarily findcareers in IS groups in industry.For working IT professionals who wish to expand into BI&A,a part-time MS or certificate program (the third option) offerpractical and valid alternatives. These certificate programscan be delivered online or on-site and need to provide theskills that will complement the current IT or business experienceof IT professionals, and/or provide technical and analyticalskills to business professionals in non-IT areas. Onlineprograms that are currently available include NorthwesternUniversity’s MS in Predictive Analytics and Stanford University’sGraduate Certificate on Mining Big Data. In addition,IS programs can help design a BI&A concentration in MBAprograms to help train a new generation of data- andanalytics-savvy managers.A key to success for a BI&A program is to integrate theconcept of “learning by doing” in the BI&A curriculum viahands-on projects, internships, and industry-guided practicum.Big data analytics requires trial-and-error and experimentation.Strong relationships and partnerships between academicprograms and industry partners are critical to foster theexperiential learning aspect of the BI&A curriculum.MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 19

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchPapers in this Special IssueThe idea for this special issue began in May 2009, whenDetmar Straub, the Editor-in-Chief of MIS Quarterly, solicitedsuggestions for special issues from the editorial boardmembers. We submitted the special issue proposal on BusinessIntelligence Research in August 2009, with the call-forpapersapproved and distributed at the 30 th Annual InternationalConference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Decemberof that year. Submissions to this special issue needed torelate to MIS Quarterly’s mission with strong managerial,organizational, and societal relevance and impact. In additionto the Design Science approach (Hevner et al. 2004; March &Storey 2008), rigorous and relevant BI-related research usingmanagement science (modeling, optimization), informationeconomics, and organizational and behavioral methodologies(case studies, surveys) was also welcomed. A total of 62manuscripts was received by October 2010. In the following20 months, six of the manuscripts went through three or fourreview rounds and were then accepted for this issue.The six papers address various aspects of the BI&A researchframework presented in this introduction paper (see Table 7).All six papers are based on BI&A 1.0, with three also basedon BI&A 2.0. The first three papers by Chau and Xu, Park etal., and Lau et al. focus on BI&A 2.0 with applications on e-commerce and market intelligence using text, web, and networkanalytics. In the next two papers, both Hu et al. andAbbasi et al. work in the category of BI&A 1.0 with a focuson security, but Hu et al. use network analytics whereasAbbasi et al. emphasize security analysis and data analytics.Finally, Sahoo et al. also work in BI&A 1.0, with direct applicationto e-commerce and market intelligence using web anddata analytics.In “Business Intelligence in Blogs: Understanding ConsumerInteractions and Communities,” Michael Chau and JenniferXu recognized the potential “gold mine” of blog content forbusiness intelligence and developed a framework forgathering business intelligence by automatically collectingand analyzing blog content and bloggers’ interaction networks.A system developed using this framework wasapplied to two case studies, which revealed novel patterns inblogger interactions and communities.Sung-Hyuk Park, Soon-Young Huh, Wonseok Oh, and SangPil Han in their paper, “A Social Network-Based InferenceModel for Validating Customer Profile Data,” argue that businessintelligence systems are of limited value when they dealwith inaccurate and unreliable data. The authors proposed asocial network-driven inference framework to determine theaccuracy and reliability of self-reported customer profiles.The framework utilizes the individuals’ social circles andcommunication patterns within their circles. To construct thespecific inference and validation model, a combination ofmethods was used, including query processing, statisticalinference, social network analysis, and user profiling. Theauthors analyzed over 20 million actual mobile call transactionsand their proposed social network-based inferencemodel consistently outperformed the alternative approaches.In “Web 2.0 Environmental Scanning and Adaptive DecisionSupport for Business Mergers and Acquisitions,” RaymondLau, Stephen Liao, K. F. Wong, and Dickson Chiu analyzedcompany mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Online environmentalscanning with Web 2.0 provides top executives withopportunities to tap into collective web intelligence to developbetter insights about the socio-cultural and political-economicfactors that cross-border M&As face. Grounded on Porter’sfive forces model, this research designed a due diligencescorecard model that leverages collective web intelligence toenhance M&A decision making. The authors also developedan adaptive business intelligence (BI) 2.0 system, which theyapplied to Chinese companies’ cross-border M&A activities.In their paper, “Network-Based Modeling and Analysis ofSystemic Risk in Banking Systems,” Daning Hu, J. LeonZhao, Zhimin Hua, and Michael Wong analyzed systemic riskin banking systems by treating banks as a network linked withfinancial relationships, leading to a network approach to riskmanagement (NARM). NARM analyzes systemic risk attributedto each individual bank via simulation based on realworlddata from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.NARM offers a new means for predicting contagious bankfailures and determining capital injection priorities at theindividual bank level in the wake of financial crisis. A simulationstudy showed that, under significant market shocks, theinterbank payment links became more influential than thecorrelated bank portfolio links in determining an individualbank’s survival.In their paper, “MetaFraud: A Meta-Learning Framework forDetecting Financial Fraud,” Ahmed Abbasi, Conan Albrecht,Anthony Vance, and James Hansen employed a designscience approach to develop MetaFraud, a meta-learningframework for enhanced financial fraud detection. A seriesof experiments was conducted on thousands of legitimate andfraudulent firms to demonstrate the effectiveness of the frameworkover existing benchmark methods. The research resultshave implications for compliance officers, investors, auditfirms, and regulators.The paper by Nachiketa Sahoo, Param Vir Singh, and TridasMukhopadhyay, “A Hidden Markov Model for CollaborativeFiltering,” reports on the analysis of making personalizedrecommendations when user preferences are changing. The20 MIS Quarterly Vol. 36No. 4/December 2012

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchTable 7. Summary of Special Issue Papers Within the BI&A Research FrameworkAuthors and Titles Evolutions Applications Data Analytics/ Research ImpactsChau and Xu, “BusinessIntelligence in Blogs: UnderstandingConsumer Interactionsand Communities”Park et al., “A SocialNetwork-Based InferenceModel for ValidatingCustomer Profile Data”Lau et al., “Web 2.0Environmental Scanning andAdaptive Decision Supportfor Business Mergers andAcquisitions”Hu et al., “Network-BasedModeling and Analysis ofSystemic Risk in BankingSystems”Abbasi et al., “MetaFraud: AMeta-Learning Frameworkfor Detecting FinancialFraud”Sahoo et al., “A HiddenMarkov Model for CollaborativeFiltering”BI&A 2.0 onsocial media& networkanalyticsBI&A 1.0 &2.0 on socialnetworkanalysis andstatisticalanalysisBI&A 1.0 and2.0 onscorecardsand webanalyticsBI&A 1.0 onstatisticalanalysisBI&A 1.0 ondata miningand metalearningBI&A 1.0 onstatisticalanalysisMarket intelligenceon consumers andcommunitiesMarket intelligencein predicting customers’profilesMarket intelligenceon environmentalscanningSystemic riskanalysis andmanagement inbanking systemsFraud detectionRecommender systemswith changinguser preferencesUser-generatedcontent extractedfrom blogsSelf-reported userprofiles and mobilecall recordsBusiness informationextracted fromInternet andproprietary financialinformationU.S. banking informationextracted fromFDIC and FederalReserve WireNetworkFinancial ratios, andorganizational andindustrial-level contextfeaturesBlog reading data,Netflix prize data set,and Last.fm data• Text and networkanalytics• Community detection• Network visualization• Network analytics• Anomaly detection• Predictive analytics• Text and web analytics• Sentiment and affectanalysis• Relation mining• Network and dataanalytics• Descriptive andpredictive modeling• Discrete event simulation• Data analytics• Classification &generalization• Adaptive learning• Data and web analytics• Statistical dynamic model• Collaborative filteringIncreased salesand customersatisfactionPersonalizedrecommendationand increasedcustomersatisfactionStrategic decisionmaking inmergers andacquisitionsMonitoring andmitigating ofcontagious bankfailuresFinancial frauddetectionPersonalizedrecommendationsauthors proposed a hidden Markov model based on collaborativefiltering to predict user preferences and make the mostappropriate personalized recommendations for the predictedpreference. The authors employed real world data sets andsimulations to show that, when user preferences are changing,there is an advantage to using the proposed algorithm overexisting ones.Summary and ConclusionsThrough BI&A 1.0 initiatives, businesses and organizationsfrom all sectors began to gain critical insights from thestructured data collected through various enterprise systemsand analyzed by commercial relational database managementsystems. Over the past several years, web intelligence, webanalytics, web 2.0, and the ability to mine unstructured usergeneratedcontents have ushered in a new and exciting era ofBI&A 2.0 research, leading to unprecedented intelligence onconsumer opinion, customer needs, and recognizing newbusiness opportunities. Now, in this era of Big Data, evenwhile BI&A 2.0 is still maturing, we find ourselves poised atthe brink of BI&A 3.0, with all the attendant uncertainty thatnew and potentially revolutionary technologies bring.This MIS Quarterly Special Issue on Business IntelligenceResearch is intended to serve, in part, as a platform andconversation guide for examining how the IS discipline canbetter serve the needs of business decision makers in light ofmaturing and emerging BI&A technologies, ubiquitous BigData, and the predicted shortages of data-savvy managers andof business professionals with deep analytical skills. Howcan academic IS programs continue to meet the needs of theirtraditional students, while also reaching the working ITprofessional in need of new analytical skills? A new visionfor IS may be needed to address this and other questions.By highlighting several applications such as e-commerce,market intelligence, e-government, healthcare, and security,and by mapping important facets of the current BI&Aknowledge landscape, we hope to contribute to future sourcesof knowledge and to augment current discussions on theimportance of (relevant) academic research.MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4/December 2012 21

Chen et al./Introduction: Business Intelligence ResearchFinally, the six papers chosen for this special issue are themselvesa microcosm of the current state of BI&A research.These “best of the best” research papers showcase how highqualityacademic research can address real-world problemsand contribute solutions that are relevant and long lasting—exactly the challenge that our discipline continues to face.AcknowledgmentsWe wish to thank the Editor-in-Chief of MIS Quarterly, DetmarStraub, for his strong support for this special issue from its inception.He shared the belief that business intelligence and analytics isan emerging and critical IS research area. We appreciate thecontinued support from the incoming Editor-in-Chief, Paulo Goes,and his feedback on an earlier version of this paper. We also thankJanice DeGross and Jennifer Syverson from the MIS Quarterlyoffice for their professional editorial support and Cathy Larson forher support and assistance in managing the manuscripts andcoordinating the review process.We are grateful to our excellent group of 35 associate editors (listedbelow) and the reviewers (too numerous to name) who carried outthe review process in a timely manner while still meeting MISQuarterly's high expectations of scholarly quality. We thank theauthors of these 62 submissions who chose to submit their researchto our special issue. We are especially indebted to the associateeditors who handled the six accepted papers of the special issue.They and the reviewers they invited offered valuable critiques andsuggestions throughout the review process. This special issue wouldnot have been possible without their efforts.The research reported in this article was partially supported by thefollowing sources: National Science Foundation (NSF CMMI-1057624, CMMI-0926270, CNS-0709338), Defense Threat ReductionAgency (DTRA HDTRA-09-0058), J. Mack Robinson Collegeof Business at the Georgia State University, Carl H. Lindner Collegeof Business at the University of Cincinnati, and the Eller College ofManagement at the University of Arizona. We also thank thefollowing colleagues for their assistance or comments: Ee-PengLim, Ted Stohr, Barbara Wixom, Yukai Lin, and Victor Benjamin.Special Issue Associate EditorsGediminas Adomavicius, University of MinnesotaSue Brown, University of ArizonaMichael Chau, University of Hong KongCecil Chua, University of AucklandWendy Currie, Audencia, Ecole de ManagementAndrew Gemino, Simon Fraser UniversityPaulo Goes, University of ArizonaAlok Gupta, University of MinnesotaPaul Jen-Hwa Hu, University of UtahHemant Jain, University of Wisconsin – MilwaukeeRobert Kauffman, Singapore Management UniversityVijay Khatri, Indiana UniversityGondy Leroy, Claremont Graduate UniversityTing-Peng Liang, National Chengchi UniversityEe-Peng Lim, Singapore Management UniversityVijay Mookerjee, University of Texas at DallasSridhar Narasimhan, Georgia Institute of TechnologyJeffrey Parsons, Memorial University of NewfoundlandH. Raghav Rao, The State University of New York at BuffaloRaghu T. Santanam, Arizona State UniversityBalasubramaniam Ramesh, Georgia State UniversityRamesh Sharda, Oklahoma State UniversityMatti Rossi, Aalto University School of EconomicsMichael Jeng-Ping Shaw, University of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignOlivia Sheng, University of UtahKeng Siau, Missouri University of Science and TechnologyAtish Sinha, University of Wisconsin – MilwaukeeAlexander Tuzhilin, New York UniversityVijay Vaishnavi, Georgia State UniversityDoug Vogel, City University of Hong KongChih-Ping Wei, National Taiwan UniversityBarbara Wixom, University of VirginiaCarson Woo, University of British ColumbiaDaniel Zeng, University of ArizonaJ. 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