Benchmarking: An International Journal

Review of business intelligence through data analysis

Belle Selene Xia, Peng Gong,
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Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 21 Issue: 2, pp.300-311, https://doi.org/10.1108/
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BIJ
21,2
300
Received 1 August 2012
Revised 20 September 2012
Accepted 20 September
2012
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Benchmarking: An International
Journal
Vol. 21 No. 2, 2014
pp. 300-311
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1463-5771
DOI 10.1108/BIJ-08-2012-0050
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-5771.htm
Review of business intelligence
through data analysis
Belle Selene Xia
Department of Economics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, and
Peng Gong
Department of Communication Engineering,
Aalto University School of Electric Engineering, Espoo, Finland
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of business intelligence (BI) in a consulting
company. The authors propose to analyze quality through data analysis and efficiency under different
business contexts. The best processes and tools in data mining are also explored.
Design/methodology/approach – Management perspectives of data analysis from Florilla
Consulting Company are collected using an inductive research approach. Based on a large sample
of qualitative data, cost-and-benefit analysis is used to assess the BI technologies as a strategic
necessity to Florilla Consulting Company.
Findings – Findings classify the best processes and tools of data analysis under different business
scenarios. The authors also propose a revised process and tools for Florilla Consulting Company to be
further evaluated by future research.
Practical implications – The insights offered in this paper derives authentic value for any
consulting company that is interested to benefit from the opportunities bought by the BI technologies.
Quality management also gets a new dimension when technology is integrated into business.
Originality/value – This study has challenged the way quality is managed in Florilla Consulting
Company. The connection of BI to quality management is explored via an empirical study of a
consulting company by linking theory with practice.
Keywords Performance management, Quality management, Data mining, Corporate strategy,
Critical success factors, Benchmarking, Data analysis, Business intelligence, OLAP
Paper type Research paper
Introduction to the importance of business intelligence
The business environment is becoming more competitive so that information
advantage is gaining a rising importance. Consequently, the utilization of business
intelligence (BI) to support decision-making is becoming a popular topic of research.
By understanding the characteristics of different BI technologies, consulting
companies like Florilla, can choose the most effective data analysis process and tool
The authors of this study would like to heartily thank the anonymous reviewers for their
constructive comments. The authors would like to also gratify the research funding provided by
Florilla Consulting Company. The in-depth discussions, as part of data collection, were enabled
by the insights of the personnel working in the company. Special thanks to the senior advisors
and product owners. This study is based on the thesis work done by Peng Gong for Florilla
Consulting Company.
Conflict of interest declaration. The authors received research funding from Florilla
Consulting Company. This study is based upon the thesis work done by Peng Gong for Florilla
Consulting Group.
 to fight competition in the market. This is linked to quality management, as it require Review of
the management of process and tool quality together with committed leadership. business
Evelson (2008) in Forrester Research has defined BI to a set of processes and tools that
transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more intelligence
effective strategic decision-making. We understand BI to be a decision supportive
system that has an important role in the creation of information advantages, which is
the core business of Florilla Consulting Company. In addition, concepts of data mining 301
(DM), data warehousing (DW) and data mart all fit under the umbrella term of BI.
Nowadays, it seems that BI is also concerned with the related concepts of business
performance management (BPM), decision support system (DSS), and management
support system (MSS) (Grabova et al., 2010).
The aim of this paper is to analyze the role of BI in a data analysis consulting
company. Based on a large set of qualitative data, we will point out the specific
improvements needed in the status quo of Florilla Consulting Company in its data
analysis approach using inductive research and cost-benefit analysis (CBA).
Specifically, the company’s customer satisfaction will be improved through the
analysis of alternative work processes and the establishment of quality improvement
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goals based on its current processes and tools. We will also assess the usefulness of these
processes and tools for other similar consulting companies operating in the BI industry.
Via CBA, we aim to find the best process and tool under different business scenarios.
We can think of BI technologies as a system that identifies the data challenges and
opportunities using analytic methods. One of the most common application areas of BI is
planning and forecasting. For example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and
customer relationship management (CRM) systems are used by many corporations to
handle finance, general reporting, and profitability analysis because these systems
allow data access and collection from diverse sources. Specifically, SAP is the most
known ERP system, and Microsoft CRM application is the most known CRM system.
In case of Florilla Consulting Company, it possesses its own processes and tools for the
same purpose.
Florilla Consulting Company is a consulting company that combines the knowledge
of value network and the asset of DM in its product offering. Currently, the Florilla
Product Family includes Data Forecasting and Trend Analysis. Therefore, an effective
data analysis process and tool are a strategic necessity for the company to compete
against the big players in the market in terms of price and quality. The proposed
process and tool improvements in this study will meet the vision of the company,
which is to offer the best solution to the clients at a reasonable price giving them an
information advantage. The results of this research are also useful to the top
decision-makers with regard to quality management. The management morale of
Florilla Consulting Company is to lead the company to long term success by
empowering all of its employees to improve customer satisfaction through improved
processes and tools.
The research problem of this paper is formulated as follows:
RQ1. What would be the most effective data analysis process and tool for
consulting companies operating in the BI industry?
Specifically, we will show the current processes and tools used in the company
including their benefits and drawbacks. Then, we will suggest improvements for these
 BIJ processes and tools in line with the industry trend. The scope of this research is limited
21,2 to the case company to be analyzed.
The literature used in this study originates from the well-known international
research on the topics of BI, DM and quality management. Case study is used to link
theory with practice by discussing real world examples. Specifically, this study will use
the knowledge derived from the current data analysis processes and tools used in Florilla
302 Consulting Company and the vision of these processes and tools from the company
representatives. We will also analyze the data analysis processes and tools previously
used by the company and compare with the available data analysis process and tools in
the industry via a cost-and-benefit analysis. At last but not the least, we will build a
finalized data analysis process and tools to be adopted by the company in the future.

Integration of BI
The benefits of BI technologies improve the business performance of consulting
companies, as decision-making is simplified where managers can access and evaluate
company’s data at any given point of time and where employees can share useful data
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(Scholz et al., 2010). As a matter of fact, a research carried out by Thomson (2004)
classified the major benefits of BI based on a survey research. He has shown that
BI allows faster and more accurate reporting (81 percent), improved decision-making
(78 percent), improved customer service (56 percent) and increased revenue (49 percent).
Davenport (2010) and Foley and Guillemette (2010) also confirmed that BI technologies
have become the top spending priority of corporate information technology
organizations, and BI is one of the few areas of technology that are still growing
(Xu et al., 2007). We also have to discuss the disadvantages of BI technologies, which
include the costs, complexity and duration of implementation associated with the
BI technologies (Jaglan et al., 2011; Turban et al., 2011). The high cost of integrating
BI technologies is always a financial challenge especially for small and medium sized
companies. Additional costs are accrued from hardware standards and business
transactions. BI technologies also involve complicated setups and related DM
techniques, which all require technical expertise to manage (Kumar and Chadha, 2011).
Companies that currently do not use BI technologies think that BI technologies are not
essential to their daily operations.
Turban et al. (2011) proposed a state-of-the-art BI system that includes four major
components such as:
(1) the DW that processes the data source;
(2) the BI analytical tools that manipulate the data;
(3) the BPM used to monitor the business performance; and
(4) a user interface that shows the results returned from the DW.

Nowadays, most of the companies have their own BI technologies to manipulate

enterprise data into performance indicators. Specifically, the core of BI technologies is
based on data analysis. Data analysis also includes DM and Predictive Analytics. It is
used to for example predict the most likely defaulters in loan applications or to predict
sales volumes from different retail locations. In addition, data analysis is widely used for
CRM customer analytics, health care, and education industries (Umesh and Saurabh,
2011). In case of Florilla Consulting Company, data analysis offers the advantages of
 data forecasting and trend analysis, which constitutes the core products of the company. Review of
Next, we will go through the key components of data analysis. business
Inmon (1996) has defined DW to be a subject-oriented and time-variant collection of
data that supports the management’s decision-making process. Likewise, Han and intelligence
Kamber (2006) have defined DW to be a process of data cleaning, data integration, data
transformation, data loading, and periodic data refreshing. Therefore, having
well-defined DW architecture is the first step in the integration of BI technologies. 303
Most DWs are built using relational database management systems. Oracle and
Microsoft SQL Server are the most widely used ones in this case due to their
compatibility with the client/server and web-based architectures. It should be noted that
while DW allows the long-term storage of data from multiple sources, this does not mean
that all the data and extraction transformation load (ETL) should be stored and handled
in DW repository only. According to Han and Kamber (2006), DW provides a
competitive advantage to consulting companies by presenting relevant information that
can be used to measure performance. As a matter of fact, DW enhances business
productivity by gathering information that describes organization’s performances.
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It also facilitates CRM by providing customer views. Since data are stored to provide
information from the historical past, DW detects long-term relationships of the data for
forecasting and comparisons purposes.
Data mart is a subset of DW that typically focuses on a single subject area. A data
mart can be dependent or independent. A dependent data mart is a subset created
directly from the DW and uses data models to provide quality data (Turban et al., 2011).
An independent data mart is separated from the enterprise DW and is designed
especially for a strategic business unit. Due to the high integration costs of DW, many
smaller consulting companies have decided to use a scaled-down version of the
enterprise DW in the form of independent data mart (Ravi, 2009). In addition to DW and
data mart, online analytical processing (OLAP) is also part of BI technologies. Prabhu
(2007) has defined OLAP to be a software technology that enables decision-makers to
gain insights from the data that has been transformed from raw data to useful
information. In other words, OLAP manages historical data by providing data
aggregations at different level. However, the main difference between OLAP and DM is
that OLAP supports model-driven analysis while DM supports data-driven analysis.
As a matter of fact, many of the DW functions, such as classification, prediction,
clustering, and association can be integrated with OLAP. Nevertheless, while OLAP
provides a consistent view of the status quo, it cannot make future predictions or explain
the reasons behind the events (Prabhu, 2007).
DM is the core of BI. Turban et al. (2011) have defined DM to be a process that uses
statistical and artificial intelligence techniques to extract and identify useful information
and patterns from large sets of data. DM tools can be combined with spread sheets and
other software development tools so that the mined data can be analyzed and deployed
quickly. Sometimes, parallel processing is also necessary due to the large amount of
data. DM has been widely used for customer segmentation, financial forecasting, credit
card fraud detection, inventory management and marketing purposes (Coenen, 2004).
As supported by Han and Kamber (2006), especially banks, retail stores, manufacturers,
stock trading and health care have all benefited from DM. We refer DM to tabular DM
where data in tabular data format is processed into data module. There exist also
non-tabular DM, such as text mining, multimedia mining and web mining depending on
 BIJ the format of the data input. Other than the most frequently used tabular DM, text
21,2 mining and web mining are becoming more popular. According to Turban et al. (2011)
text mining is the semi-automated process of extracting patterns from large sets of
unstructured data sources. Likewise, web mining is the process of discovering intrinsic
relationships from web data, which are expressed via textual, linkage, or usage
information. Web mining also includes web content mining, web structure mining and
304 web usage mining (Chaudhuri et al., 2011). Currently, Florilla Consulting Company is
using web mining to classify their customers by analyzing their feedbacks in web forms.
There are many variations of the DM process including cross-industry standard
process for data mining (CRISP-DM) and Sample, explore, modify, model and assess
(SEMMA). Companies may use different processes and models for different DM tasks.
CRISP-DM was first established in the middle of 1990s and is iterative by nature
(Khabaza, 2010). “SEMMA” is another well-known methodology developed by the SAS
Institute. Having a representative sample of the data, SEMMA makes it easy to apply
exploratory statistical and visualization techniques to predict outcomes and confirm a
model’s accuracy. SEMMA is also driven by a highly iterative experimentation cycle.
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Nevertheless, the main difference between CRISP-DM and SEMMA is that CRISP-DM
is more comprehensive, whereas SEMMA implicitly assumes that the goals of DM
have already been identified and understood.
DM studies are central to Florilla Consulting Company. Currently, there are several
methods of performing DW studies, including prediction, classification, regression,
clustering, and association. Most DM software tools use more than one algorithm or
technique for each of these methods (Bramer, 2007). First of all, we start with a dataset,
called instances. Every dataset comprises of a number of variables with values, called
attributes. In total, there are two types of data, which are treated differently. One data
type, called labeled data, is a specially designated attribute, and the aim is to use the
given data to predict the value of the attribute that has not been yet seen. This process is
known as supervised learning in contrast to unsupervised learning using unlabeled
data. We categorize DM methods into five main categories based on the studies of
Bramer (2007), namely prediction, classification, numerical prediction, cluster analysis
and association rule mining. Specifically, prediction is often associated with the concept
of forecasting. However, prediction encompasses the identification of distribution trends
based on the available data, while forecasting takes sequences of through time as and
then imputes the future values using a variety of machine-learning and statistical
techniques. Classification is the most frequently used DM method. It predicts categorical
class labels and constructs a model to describe a set of predetermined classes by the class
label attribute. There are a number of techniques that can be used for classification such
as decision tree analysis, statistical analysis, neural networks, Bayesian classifiers,
case-based reasoning and genetic algorithms.
Microsoft SQL Server DM, ORACLE DM, SAS/SAS Enterprise Miner, RapidMiner
Enterprise Edition, SPSS PASW Modeler (formery known as Clementine), Microsoft
Excel and MATLAB as well as other software vendors provide powerful DM tools for
the customers. In addition to these commercial tools, free DM software tools are
available as well, for example, RapidMiner Community Edition, and Weka. The main
difference between commercial tools and free tools is the efficiency of computation and
feasibility of usage due to the computer memory. As a matter of fact, according to a
questionnaire conducted by the Enterprise and Academy with a response rate of
 1,103 participants via an online pool on the KD Nuggets web site (KD Nuggets, 2005a, b, Review of
c, d), RapidMiner, R, and Excel are still on the top three most popular free DM software business
tools, with SAS being the most popular commercial tool. Yet, Microsoft SQL Server 2008
(Microsoft, 2008) is one of the most popular BI capable suites for DM tasks where data intelligence
and models are stored in the same relational database environment so that performance
management is considerably easier.
Oracle DM is part of the Oracle Relational Database Management System. It contains 305
several DM algorithms for prediction, classification, and association, which help
analytics to manage DM tasks inside the Oracle’s database environment. RapidMiner,
on the other hand, is offered in an open-source environment. It is available as a
stand-alone application for data analysis. RapidMiner combines data integration,
analytical ETL, data analysis, and reporting in one single suite. In addition, it provides a
powerful graphical user interface and supports hundreds of data loading, data
transformation, data modeling, and data visualization methods. In addition,
RapidAnalytics can act as a team server for RapidMiner. As a matter of fact,
RapidAnalytics is used to present interactive reports to the customers. RapidMiner
Community Edition is the same product as RapidMiner Enterprise Edition but with
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much less features. While it lists the available DM models within, but is not stable, which
increase the risk of DM failure.

Methodology in evaluation of BI
There exist many methodologies to analyze the processes and tools used in BI, some being
qualitative and some being quantitative. We have decided to apply inductive research
and CBA to a large set of qualitative data obtained from in-depth interview to establish a
feasible data analysis framework for Florilla Consulting Company. Therefore, it is of vital
importance to not only to understand the available data analysis processes and tools in
the industry but also the future needs of these processes and tools. In case of conflicting
opinions, meaning is interpreted from the content and context of the data via analytic
procedures. In other words, the qualitative data and the interview transcripts used in the
study are reviewed and categorized for useful purposes according to the aims of the study.
Conclusions are drawn in consistent to the methods and findings of this study.
Benefit-cost analysis centre at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, University
of Washington’s (2005) has stated that CBA, also known as benefit-cost analysis (BCA),
aims to inform the decision-makers with specific information measured in monetary
terms of willingness to pay for a change. In this case we are interested to know the
benefits and drawbacks of different BI technologies for data analysis consulting
companies. Fuguitt and Wilcox (1999) have also defined CBA to be a useful approach to
assess whether decisions or choices that affect the use of scarce resources promote
efficiency, which is also one of our goals in this study to analyze the connection between
BI and quality management in Florilla Consulting Company. Given all relevant
alternatives, CBA is the systematic identification of policy consequences followed by
valuation of benefits and costs according to the appropriate decision criteria. In this
study, we define CBA to be an economic decision-making approach that collects and
quantifies all the positive and negative factors of the decision in order to find out the
worthiness of their consequences. Given that CBA is one of the most widely used
methods for deciding project investment, this is a particularly useful method for
evaluating the data analysis processes and tools used in Florida Consulting Company.
 BIJ Case study
21,2 Based on the traditional literature on the topics of BI as well as the in-depth interview
results, we will formulate a data analysis framework for Florilla Consulting Company to
conduct their daily operations. This framework consists of BI architecture, DM process,
and DM tools that are chosen based on their suitability and feasibility for the given
company in question. Our model is dependent on the current trend in BI, customer
306 requirements and industry environment. In addition, we will also show the benefits of
these BI components for other consulting companies as well. It is acknowledged that the
communication of these work practices depends on committed leadership, and thus is
closely related to quality management.
The BI architecture largely depends on the size and the business goals of the
company. Based on the previous analysis, BPM and DSS both allows the company to
measure, monitor, and manage its business performances by supporting fast
decision-making. However, this would require the setup of a DW. In addition, a BI
Architecture with integrated OLAP would help any consulting companies to monitor its
business performance and act to the changes in the competitive market. However, it is
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acknowledged that DW may be quite expensive to build and maintain during the
integration phase. Alternatively, data mart could be a better choice for Florilla
Consulting Company.
Irrespective of which BI technology is chosen, the DM process must be executed in
any case. Therefore, the DM process must be reliable and repeatable by employees
with little BI background. Currently, it is the case that while increasing training in
BI technologies is made available to Florilla employees, there are still many of whose
knowledge in BI technology is rather little. Consequently, CRISP-DM is a mature and
widely-used DM process that can be adopted as a standard DM process for Florilla
Consulting Company. It provides a uniform framework for guidelines and experience
documentation and is flexible to different data and business problems as well.
The traditional DFSS project methodology is in line with the current project
methodology used in Florilla Consulting Company. First of all, the manager of the DM
project, who is responsible for the business objectives, communicates with the data
analysts to explore the feasibility of the project. Then, the senior data analyst, who is
responsible for the metadata of the data source and the target database, would adjust the
raw data should the collected data not correspond to the business objectives. Thereafter,
data pre-processing can start. Microsoft Excel is a very commonly-used and handy tool
for this task. Missing or invalid data can be spotted by Florilla data analysts manually
via a pre-validation tool with validation rules. Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 (Microsoft,
2008) also provides an integration service to handle the pre-processing of data. However,
this requires the data analysts at Florilla Consulting Company to create the design of the
process in order to filter out the invalid data. The company has the goal to adopt
Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 (Microsoft, 2008) before the year 2015.
Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise costs approximately e20,000-22,000. It includes
features such as DW, Advanced DM and Data Integration and Enterprise Data
Management. SQL server also has a light version which does not require any SQL
server setup and implementation, and the cost is approximately e230 per usage, but
currently this does not provide enough features for the daily operation of the company.
Oracle, on the other hand, provides only the enterprise version, which has a relatively
high cost. As a matter of fact, the minimum costs for the implementation totals up to
 e28,000-e32,000. Therefore, Oracle has been considered as one of the most expensive Review of
database providers. However, if the customer has Oracle database setup, then DM business
works better with the Oracle DM features. In case of Florilla Consulting Company, if the
company possesses business analysts who are familiar with the Oracle technology, intelligence
then the cost problem is partially reduced by offering consulting services to the
customers onsite. In addition, Microsoft Excel may be the most common Microsoft
Office tool that all companies use for daily businesses. The basic features of Excel 307
include data sorting and data filtering. Excel also has a special feature for DM, but this
requires Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Service in addition.
The DM tools that are appropriate for any company should be chosen based on its
financial status, the DM field and the customer’s requirement. If Florilla Consulting
Company aims to have its own DM infrastructure, this would require not only the
database itself, but also the corresponding DM tools; however, if the deployment is at
the customer site, then the DM tools are dependent on the setup of the customer’s
database infrastructure. In addition, no matter what tool the company decides to use,
the DM deployment should always follow the DM process defined previously.
In accordance with the interview results from the company representatives,
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RapidMiner Standard Enterprise Edition is highly recommended as an additional DM

tool for Florilla Consulting Company because it not only works with any of the other
databases and tools, but is also open source. RapidMiner Standard Enterprise Edition
offers full support for technical as well as analytical problems for up to five users, and the
setup is relatively easy. In addition, RapidMiner is also open to Florilla data analysts’
own codes to allow a flexible framework. Likewise, Microsoft Excel is beneficial for the
company’s daily business due to the cost and the functionality of this tool. While
Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Server are quite similar in terms of costs and
performance, both are commercial tools. Consequently, the choice depends on the
customer DM requirements and the skill of Florilla data analysts. Nevertheless, the
benefits of these commercial tools are high especially in case of complicated DM projects.
The only uncertain option for the DM tasks is to use company’s own code. Nevertheless,
the project managers in Florilla Consulting Company find it difficult to plan and
schedule the DM project in advance.

Conclusion
We have employed a wide range of academic research and qualitative data as a
foundation for this study. The most well-known literature is explored particularly in the
fields of BI and DM. We have introduced BI and its components as well as their benefits
and drawbacks. Then, we have discussed the associated concepts under the umbrella
term, BI, such as DW, data mart, and OLAP, which are central to data analysis. We have
also analyzed these components and shown the ways to integrate them in order to
achieve sound business performances. Based on the previous analysis, a suggested BI
architecture and process are established for Florilla Consulting Company, which would
be useful for other data analysis consulting companies as well.
We have emphasized the importance of DM to the operation of Florilla Consulting
Company due to its benefits and linkage with the different databases and DW.
Consequently, we have discussed the related processes and the most popular tools that
have been used in the DM industry. We have also categorized the various DM methods
and their techniques for future reference. All these choices of processes and tools have
 BIJ been confirmed with the representatives of Florilla Consulting Company. Moreover, in
21,2 order to benefit from the BI technology and align it with the company’s quality
management goals, not only is customer needs vital but also executive commitment,
product development and performance measurement too.
The key point of this study focuses on the optimal integration level of the
BI technology in Florilla Consulting Company. While DW, data mart and OLAP can be
308 integrated into one system, small and medium-scaled companies, like Florilla Consulting
Company, are often constrained with the budget on the implementation of a heavy
BI architecture, and thus chooses a simpler design. Poe et al. (1997) has shown a simple
architecture where DW works in conjunction with data mart receiving raw data from the
database. This kind of design incorporates simple functions where all the extraction,
transformation and loading of the data are handled in the DW. However, this may reduce
the overall performance of the BI system. In addition, the DW queries are often complex
and involves the computation of large sets of data at aggregated levels, and thus
processing the OLAP queries in the operational databases may degrade the performance
of operational tasks; these being the challenges with this type of architecture design.
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In the future, Florilla Consulting Company has the goal to implement a design where an
integrated database feeds the DW. In this case, Florilla data analysts may extract the data
for reporting purposes and update the data without lowering the overall performance of
the BI system. Well-implemented BI architecture is also shown in the research work of
Chaudhuri et al. (2011) where OLAP, DM and reporting engines are positioned separately
as mid-tier servers to enhance the performance of the DW to the maximum.
Modeling of data is currently widely used within Florilla Consulting Company.
It starts so that the senior data analysts in the company define the variables and their
relationships beforehand. Then, the data analysts aim to find the best model that tunes
the most correct result. The analysts also decide the DM algorithm to be used in the
model. If the model has been tested with good results and received good feedback from
the customers, then this model is also used for the future projects. Nevertheless, the
variables are refined each time according to the customer needs. The last step in the
process is to deploy the DM outcomes to the customer sites and see the results. On top
of this, Florilla Consulting Company has decided to adopt case-based reasoning in
order to develop a knowledge pool for future development as a result of this study.
Based on the academic theories and in line with the industry trend, we have
suggested improvement needs in the current DM process and tools for Florilla
Consulting Company. Since this research is studied in the mainstream of data analysis in
the industry, many details of the DM process and tool shown in this study have already
being widely used and acknowledged by other consulting companies as well.
Nevertheless, the new appearing web-based BI approaches have not been discussed
from an empirical point of view due to the immaturity of the given technology in
question. Nowadays, especially small companies require lightweight architectures to
provide online data analysis for their customers, and thus web warehousing, being part
of the BI technology, is a rising topic of research. Subsequently, a future research
opportunity would be to explore the usage of web warehousing for small and
middle-scaled consulting companies.
Due to the scale of the DM project and limitation of the try-out, we cannot test all of
our results with the customer data using different DM tools. The software license for the
different database setup is also one source of limitation in this study. Nevertheless, it is
 understandable that implementing a full process of various DM tasks to try out our Review of
results would have taken too much time and financial costs. Yet, the business framework business
build as a result of discussion in this study will be adopted in Florilla Consulting
Company and is found to be extremely useful. Therefore, the same framework can be intelligence
suggested to be other similar consulting companies in the data analysis field. Next, we
propose to deploy the same DM project with different DM tools and see which one
performs the best according to speed. 309

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About the authors
Belle Selene Xia was the Founder of Florilla Consulting Company. Previously, she has been 311
working as an integration consultant for a leading Nordic ICT consulting company, specializing
in communications, software development and business-critical IT solutions. Since the beginning
of the year 2012, she has shifted her career focus to banking and financial services.
Belle Selene Xia is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: selene.xia@live.com
Peng Gong has been previously working as an application specialist for CRF Inc. As a
member of the maintenance team, Peng Gong was responsible for the maintenance of an OEDC
system and the management of data in a DB2 Database. Later, he became the software
consultant of Automaster Oy, where he was providing technical assistance in databases and
project development for Scania.
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