User perspectives on business intelligence

The research articles in this issue are related to business intelligence in one way or another. The article by Salmas, Alebpour and Homayounvala is entitled “Identification and classification of organizational level competencies for BI success”. In their research the authors have identified competencies that can be used as a measure to evaluate an organization’s status with regards to business intelligence success. Since the study done by Adamala and Cidrin (2011) this journal has shown a strong interest in user evaluations of business intelligence systems. The article by Ghasemi and Rowshan presents a new approach to the early warning literature. Entrepreneurs are the group that more than anyone else are seeking out early insights and also rewarded by their ability to look ahead. In the literature this is known as “entrepreneurial alertness.” Science can never accept that some people are simply born entrepreneurs or have “eureka” moments: we want to understand why and how. From an intelligence perspective picking up early signals can be seen as a signal for which entrepreneurs to follow and listen to. The ability to gather data from socialmedia through the use of BI tools should make this possible once these entrepreneurs are identified. The article by Ghasemi and Rowshan does not go in this direction, but such research would be welcome in the future.The article by Avner entitled “Study on competitive intelligence in Isreal: 2016 update” is a status report for competitive intelligence within Israeli firms. The results are compared with a study conducted by the same author in 2006. The study shows that there has been no significant change in CI practices in Israel during the past ten years. It also confirms that competitive intelligence is primarily a tool used by larger organizations. This means that Israeli companies have been slower to adopt new business intelligence software, and this is something that respondents see as a problem.The article by Solberg Søilen entitled “Users’ perception of data as a service (DaaS)” is an investigation into a new market related to business intelligence. On one hand this is a survey addressing one particular type of users—namely market intelligence (MI), competitive intelligence (CI) and businessintelligence (BI) professionals and experts—and their preferences. On the other hand, this is a critical analysis about the consequences of the issues addressed by users. It is also an attempt to present DaaS in a shorter historical perspective.The case study on Qoros automotive manufacturing by Ahmadinia and Karim is an analysis of how the company could enter the European market. It has now been more than a year since JISIB decided to publish case studies as articles. The Qorors case is not only a good teaching case, but is also a goodillustration of how intelligence topics can be tied to marketing questions and the larger question about competitive advantage.As always, we would above all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB. Since the beginning of the year the journal has been supported by a three year grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR). This has allowed us to increase the quality in layout design and review theEnglish grammar.