2009 Hong Kong BI Practice Survey Report (CityU IS Dept and HKCS BISID)

The Current Business Intelligence Practice in Hong Kong

By

Dr. Raymond Y.K. Lau and Johnny C.F. So

Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong

And

Hong Kong Computer Society – Business Intelligence Special Interest Division (BISID)

1. Background

Effective, comprehensive and timely business information is extremely crucial in the rapidly changing business environment nowadays. With the capabilities of information technology innovation, Business Intelligence (BI), which refers to the applications and technologies used to gather, archive, and analyze complex corporate information to facilitate planners and decision makers to make timely and effective decisions (Negash and Gray 2008), plays an important role in this context and attracts many interests from both practitioners and researchers. The purpose of this study is to raise the awareness of the potential applications of BI in various business sectors and for the continuous improvement of the BI practices in Hong Kong.

2. Survey Methodology

Through the BISID of the Hong Kong Computer Society, representatives of major BI vendors invited their clients to participate in a BI survey which was conducted from 3rd

November 2008 to 31 December 2008. The Hong Kong Computer Society (outside BISID) also invited its members to participate in the BI Survey. Respondents voluntarily participated in the online BI survey. The survey engine was hosted at the Department of Information Systems of City University of Hong Kong, and the post-survey data analysis was performed by a research team at the Department of Information Systems of City University of Hong Kong.

3. Survey Demographics

Out of the 64 respondents, 97% of them replied that they heard about the term “Business Intelligence” before answering the survey. Most respondents (67%) are involved in making decisions regarding the acquisition or the deployment of BI solutions. Given such a general background, respondents should be able to understand the survey questions and provide relevant answers. Most of the respondents’ organizations are established over 20 years (59%) or between 10 to 20 years (19%); 34% of the respondents come from large organizations which employ over 5,000 employees. Among these organizations, 26% of them have applied BI solutions from 10 to 20 years, 17% have applied BI solutions from 2 to 5 years, and 22% of the organizations have not applied any BI solutions yet. The main business sectors of the responding organizations are IT services (19%), transportation and logistics (13%), and banking (11%). It seems that most of the responding organizations are large and well-established companies. However, a large percentage of the respondents seem coming from the IT sector.