Challenges from within Business Intelligence Solutions

One problem is that if Vietnamese businesses do not quickly make major changes in business habits, it will be difficult for them to widely and successfully apply BI solutions, and as a result, it will be difficult for them to develop sustainably and reach further goals.

2. Challenges from within Business Intelligence solutions

A BI solution itself also brings great challenges for businesses that want to deploy this solution. There are many great challenges that come from within this solution, including investment costs for BI solution application, system complexity and requirements for professional qualifications.

2.1 Investment costs for Business Intelligence applications

The investment costs to implement BI solutions become a major barrier for many businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. (It should be noted that, when studying the application of an information technology solution in general and a BI solution in particular, the term small and medium-sized enterprises includes businesses with revenue under 1 billion USD). Typically, the price to purchase and deploy a simple BI software is 50,000 USD. As for large BI software, solving complex problems, performing difficult decision-making tasks and best suited to the systems in the enterprise can cost up to millions of USD. That only refers to the price of BI software, while to deploy a BI solution application, it is impossible to stop at just purchasing BI software for the enterprise. Investment costs for BI applications can be divided into two large groups: infrastructure costs and sunk costs. Infrastructure costs include costs for technical infrastructure such as hardware, software, equipment, connection systems, servers, clients, etc. and non-technical infrastructure such as policies, procedures, instructions, and standards. Non-technical infrastructure will cost very little and almost nothing if the business does not buy external services but builds the contents of the non-technical infrastructure itself. However, the contents of the technical infrastructure are extremely expensive. Investing in machinery and equipment requires the business to have a large investment budget and strong, stable financial capacity. Particularly the issue

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This issue has been a big challenge for many Vietnamese businesses. But that cost is not all to invest in a project to deploy BI solutions. The sunk costs incurred such as integration costs, data transfer, testing, documentation, implementation costs, maintenance costs, training and consulting, labor costs involved in deploying and operating BI solutions,... as well as many other costs in the application deployment process make Vietnamese businesses encounter many difficulties when considering choosing to apply BI solutions to their business operations.

2.2 System complexity

In the current technological conditions, there is no BI solution that is truly simple for every business, even when the business chooses the simplest BI solution. The multidimensionality, the content BI processes and the basic features make BI solutions somewhat complex. In addition, the implementation of a BI solution involves all data in the business with a huge volume, many conflicting relationships, which a simple system is almost unable to handle. Therefore, system complexity is an indispensable feature of a BI solution. In addition, the BI solution system processes and operates complex, intertwined, and intricate relationships throughout the business. Because of that complexity, the implementation of a BI solution must be carried out according to the process of a project and managed as a large project of the business, a BI solution application project. A BI project must go through many stages. The contents of each application phase of the BI solution are also extremely complex, and contain certain risks and challenges for the enterprise. The operation of the BI system is equally complex because this system is a very large system in the enterprise, requiring the participation, collaboration, and assistance of many personnel from different departments and levels in the enterprise. These complexities make the application of BI solutions in the enterprise quite difficult and not easy to succeed, and become a barrier to popularizing the application of this solution.

especially for businesses with low technology background and understanding of applying technology to business.

2.3 Professional qualifications requirements

The complexity of the BI system and the specific application of advanced, high technology make the operation of BI solutions have very high requirements for professional qualifications. With the characteristics of the e-commerce sector, professional qualifications here include business qualifications and information technology qualifications. This is really a huge challenge for Vietnamese enterprises because the current training results of universities and colleges nationwide are mostly bachelors and engineers majoring in economics or information technology. That means, current personnel in enterprises, if they understand economics, have very little knowledge of information technology, and vice versa, if they are thorough in information technology, they have almost no knowledge of economics. Meanwhile, applying BI solutions requires knowledge exchanges between technology and business, in-depth understanding of business aspects, new technology and the application of new technology to business. The number of qualified personnel who meet the professional requirements to successfully and effectively deploy BI solutions is extremely small.

BI is also a large system and requires many personnel positions to participate in the application implementation project, including traditional business positions and positions specific to the BI project. Each position has its own requirements for expertise and skills. Some positions familiar with traditional business methods can be met more easily than other positions specific to the BI solution. However, highly specialized personnel to operate the current BI solution are very scarce. Furthermore, as analyzed above, BI is currently a very new field in Vietnam, so current Vietnamese personnel are almost not trained and educated in the field of BI, therefore, it is almost impossible to really meet the requirements of this solution.

In addition, the lack of relevant skills and abilities and low professional qualifications of employees make businesses spend more on training and coaching staff. Most of this work is done by foreign experts from training and IT solution application facilities and BI solution providers. If the company's staff already has a relatively solid foundation of e-commerce knowledge, training courses and coaching staff to operate BI solutions will be much quicker and easier. In the case of low-skilled employees, the training process takes longer and is more expensive.

3. Challenges while implementing Business Intelligence applications

3.1 Risks arising from BI application implementation stages

Although businesses can choose not to implement all stages of a BI solution implementation project, not implementing each stage of a BI application implementation project carries certain risks. These are significant challenges for businesses when implementing BI solutions in their business environment. Businesses need to consider the impact of each stage on business performance to make appropriate decisions. Risks arising from BI application implementation stages may include:

- During the business assessment phase: One of the main risks of not conducting a business assessment phase is that the enterprise may build a BI decision support solution that has no specific business drivers and does not support the strategic business goals. This can frustrate all members of the enterprise and put pressure on the enterprise management board at the end of the BI solution implementation phase. No matter how valuable the BI solution is from an IT perspective, implementing this solution without achieving the goal of supporting strategic business decisions will still not be accepted by the members of the enterprise.

If business leaders are not satisfied with the information provided to them, they may abandon BI solutions when solving business problems.

- During the enterprise infrastructure assessment phase: It is essential to periodically assess hardware, connectivity systems, DBMS, and tools, as they can degrade to the point where the BI system cannot be used. It is also necessary to grasp and update new technologies promptly. Technological advances and innovations often occur every few months. Failure to update and take advantage of new and improved features can make the BI solution application environment obsolete in a very short time. In addition, BI solutions require content that covers the entire enterprise. Failure to conduct activities across the entire enterprise can result in BI applications losing their role of integration and unification, becoming local applications, operating in a one-way direction with data conflicts within the enterprise. As a result, the enterprise will continue to lose opportunities to strengthen business decisions and improve competitiveness.

- During the project planning phase: It is impossible to build a BI project with specific goals without planning the implementation of this project. The implementation of the project may be uncontrollable without a clear plan. The enterprise may not meet the deadlines, incur many unreasonable and invalid sunk costs, implement the wrong solution or may not reach the implementation phase. The BI solution operating environment is very complex, and BI solution implementation projects are extremely expensive, so the risks of implementing the application without proper planning and control will cause great losses for the enterprise.

- During the project requirements definition phase: Some businesses may combine the project requirements definition with analysis or application prototyping activities. This can be an effective application approach but there are potential risks in not having a comprehensive view of the entire BI solution implementation project. When those doing the project requirements definition

When developers prototype too early, the overall solution is not coherent, creating many risks. Other potential risks associated with combining such phases include loss of functionality, loss of data, reduced security, failure to prioritize requirements, and failure to achieve business goals.

- During the data analysis phase: Business managers, IT managers, and technicians may not want to spend time on rigorous analysis, which involves logical data formatting, data source research, and data cleansing. They view such work as a waste of time. They judge the success of a BI implementation project by the speed of execution of processes rather than the quality of the results. As a result, businesses often copy all the existing data errors into the BI solution's operating system. Instead of eliminating the data problems, they merge them together, resulting in applications and target databases of the BI solution that have unnecessary conflicts and redundancies.

- During the application prototyping phase: The main purpose of prototyping is to ensure that the database design, access and analysis application design, and selected BI technologies will be able to meet the business requirements when the BI application is implemented for the intended purpose. By building an effective prototype, the enterprise can make accurate time and cost estimates when calculating for the complete BI solution application. The risk of not performing this phase is that the enterprise may build a BI solution that costs more money and time than the enterprise estimated and may only realize it when it is too late.

- During the metadata field analysis phase: Since one of the goals of a BI decision support solution is to remove conflicts, it is necessary to

Standardize source data. Standardization always involves a lot of changes to the source data, including renaming the data, splitting a source data element into different target columns, or creating a target column for different source data elements, and possibly translating codes into mnemonics, standardizing data values, and filtering out irrelevant or invalid data. Ultimately, the business will not be able to combine operational source data with BI solution target data unless they make these changes. This process is called metadata, and it is necessary for the business to effectively operate the BI solution. Without metadata, the business will have a hard time understanding and using the transformed data in the BI solution's target databases. This is like driving a car aimlessly for weeks or months without a map. When businesses perceive BI solutions as difficult to use or perceive BI data as unreliable because they are inconsistent with source data from enterprise operational systems, they may label the BI decision support solution as a failure.

- During the database design phase: Tables are not simple documents in a database, nor are they just another way to randomly store some data. The DBMS components involved are based on complex sets of internal rules. These rules must be understood and followed in order to design the database. It is the responsibility of the database administrator to do this. However, often programmers who do not have a thorough understanding of the internal workings of the DBMS components are entrusted with the design of the target databases of the BI solution, and the results are not good. This seriously reduces the efficiency of the operation, possibly ruining a phase or the entire BI solution application.

- During the ETL design phase: This is not an optional phase, even if the business plans not to use an ETL tool. The business needs to evaluate the source data, find ways to improve, change, and standardize

and make this source data more useful before transferring it to the BI target database. Since a BI solution implementation project is not a systems transformation project but more like a system redesign or business process improvement project, the business can change the data. The business cannot move the original data from the source to the target and then wait for the database to reject the data element for technical reasons. The business must plan, and design the change requests accordingly.

- During the metadata field design phase: Assume a metadata repository solution is not intentionally deployed. The same principles that apply to building a BI application apply to developing a metadata repository. SQL package queries are not compatible with a persistent metadata repository solution. As with any system, a lot of forethought and forethought is required before design to ensure functionality, performance, scalability, and periodic maintenance. If an enterprise decides to license a metadata repository product, it must also consider the evaluation process when purchasing a package of key operational systems. If an enterprise does not take the time to design a robust and persistent data warehouse solution, it will either have to rework the solution or end up with a poor BI decision support solution environment.

- During the ETL development phase: A well-designed and well-validated ETL process is the backbone of a BI decision support solution application environment. This is a very time-consuming phase, but without this phase, the enterprise will not have a BI solution application.

- During the application development phase: The features of BI applications are significantly enhanced with OLAP technology. In addition to multidimensional analysis capabilities, OLAP tools provide additional functions such as screen scraping, what-if analysis , data conversion to graphs or charts, and web-based query results. If this phase is not implemented, business members will be left with no choice but to

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