The business activities in any company, regardless of its size, involve the management of large quantities of information from both internal and external business environments; all these information related to internal operations, market, customers, suppliers, financial resources, etc., historically cumulated, on activity periods of the company, form the basis for some complex and extremely useful economic and financial analysis in the company's management decisions making process.The continuous development of companies in a growing competitive environment necessarily requires appropriate decisions to be made, adequate, based on significant information and as accurately predicted as possible. In the current practice, the companies have defined sets of technologies and processes that provide decision support using business information to analyze organizational performance. These solutions for decision support are based on integrated management information systems, including specialized business intelligence BI modules supporting of business
decisions.The utilization of IT&C to support and optimize a company's internal processes and integration with ebusiness activities have become very important for all economic fields. ERP software solutions, for example,allow transparent conduct of all business processes. However, in all fields of the economy, these IT&C solutions are predominantly used by large companies and, to a lesser extent, by medium and small companies.The term Business Intelligence was first mentioned in 1958 by Hans Peter Luhn in an article published in
the IBM Journal. In this paper the author defined the term by the two components: business and intelligent systems Luhn, 1958 umbrella term to describe concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based suppo . Afterwards, this term was successfully adopted by a large number of experts in DSS field, by software developers and managers. A series of technologies have had a significant impact in BI development, from these we mention Decision Support Systems DSS, Executive Information Systems EIS, Data Warehouse, OLAP and Data Mining. Currently, BI combines all these technologies in one system Negash and Grey, 2008. Regarding the classification of BI systems in a category of information systems, the opinions are divided; according to some authors, BI systems are data-driven decision support systems Power, 2002, while other authors consider that BI systems replace the Executive Information Systems. According to Negash a BI is "a strategic information system capable of providing actionable information through a centralized data repository, sourced from numerous sources, transformed into meaningful information via BI analytical tools, to facilitate business insights 2007: 34. The main objective of BI is to provide timely and quality information to those involved in decision making process by analyzing large amounts of data about the company and its activities.
Gartner defines BI platform as a software platform that delivers the following capabilities: BI infrastructure,metadata management, development tools, collaboration, reporting, dashboards, ad-hoc queries, integration with Microsoft Office, searching tools, Mobile BI, OLAP, interactive visualization, predictive modeling and data mining and scorecards Hagerty et al., 2012. From the technical point of view a Business Intelligence solution BI includes etl-tools.info: Data warehousing - architecture, modeling, storage, managing, data processing ETL process extracting, transforming, loading and data integration Implementation of reports, data visualization, dashboards
Online Analytical Processing OLAP and multidimensional data analysis
Data mining, statistical analysis, forecast.1.2. BI in SMEs
For small and medium enterprises SMEs the aspect of business intelligence and the support of management decision are variously perceived. Much of the SMEs are run by the owners which, in case they are carrying out a performance analysis for the company activities, use a less elaborated DSS, resulted from the combination of
ITC tools available in the company's own infrastructure and whose performance in managerial decision support is reduced.
The necessity of adopting some ICT solutions for decision making and the usage of BI tools is recognized by all entrepreneurs regardless of the industry they belong to, the size of the company run by them or the origin country. The adoption and the selection of a decision support solution and use of BI tools by companies require consideration of some aspects, mainly, internal ones. From the company perspective is necessary to consider some aspects regarding the ITC infrastructure, human and financial resources; obviously, in the case of resources, what need to be analyzed is, on one hand, the potential budgetary resources allocated for the adoption, implementation of DSS and BI solutions, and on the other hand, the existence of human resources starting with the managerial level to the operational level that can provide support for the efficient exploitation of the adopted solutions.Regarding the SMEs ITC infrastructure is well-known their orientation in general usage of computer networks, for sharing hardware and software, in order to increase resource efficiency and performance in information processing. The next step, building private networks, Intranet, composed of interconnected local networks, including connections to gateway computers with Internet access, offers a lot of advantages. The opening of the Intranet network to business environment and the communication with this environment using Extranet can be another important step for SMEs. The Internet, the global computer network, has brought global communication benefit at both business and
interpersonal level. The Internet services, so common today, e-mail, newsgroups and mailing lists, LISTSERVs, WAIS Wide Area Information Servers, IRC Internet Relay Chat and WWW became support for business and collaborative communication widely used and appreciated by all economic agents.The development of mobile technologies provides traditional infrastructure for businesses in the virtual environment, almost totally excluding the need for traditional corporate presences; integrating mobile and wireless technology is the modern business infrastructure.
In adopting of the BI solutions we must consider the benefits offered in decision making support such as: the quality of business information provided, powerful tools for data analysis and visualization, lower cost of decision making, web-based accessibility, increased efficiency and effectiveness of decisions.In a competitive world, a right decision, made at the right time and based on an efficient BI solution can
become a consistent competitive advantage, for any SMEs.
The frame of business intelligence for SMEs, highlighted in this paper, is common in shape and trends to those in Romania, so the same commercial suppliers have customers from Romanian SMEs and the tendencies for clouding and extension to Mobile BI solutions are followed as well.According to our study, the SMEs users can choose from a wide range of BI software solutions, starting from the open-source ones and following by the very viable alternatives like SaaS solutions and Cloud BI.
