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The implementation of an enterprise-level business intelligence initiative is a large-scale and complex undertaking, involving significant expenditure and multiple stakeholders over a lengthy period. It is therefore imperative to have systematic guidelines for business intelligence stakeholders in referring business intelligence maturity levels. Draw upon the prudent concepts of the Capability Maturity Model, this research proposes a multi-dimensional maturity model with distinct maturity levels for managing enterprise business intelligence initiatives. The maturity model, named Enterprise Business Intelligence Maturiy (EBIM), consists of five core maturity levels and four key dimensions, namely information quality, master data management, warehousing architecture, and analytics. It can be used to assist enterprises in benchmarking their business intelligence maturity level and identifying the critical areas to attain higher level of maturity.

A business intelligence architecture comprises of different unique components to collect, transform, analyze and present the structured and unstructured raw data in simple formats to assist decision makers in making timely decisions. The introduction of service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables reusable services which are accessible over a network on demand. However, there is still a lack of academic literatures on the business intelligence architecture with service-oriented concept. Based upon various references on BI architectures from major vendors, a novel BI architecture that is built on service-oriented concept is presented and described in this paper. The proposed service-oriented architecture enables enterprises to deploy a more agile, flexible, cheaper, reusable, reliable and responsive BI applications in supporting decision making process.