Business intelligence use in planning and monitoring software development work

Abstract

While the applications of business intelligence systems are diverse, their use in workload planning and monitoring especially in the software development context is a fairly unex-plored subject. Most research on business intelligence systems in general has focused on a managerial perspective as business intelligence tools are traditionally used in decision-support tasks. This thesis focused on exploring what affects software developers as IT pro-fessionals to accept business intelligence as part of the tools they use in their work in gen-eral and how these systems could be used in effective workload planning and monitoring tasks from the perspective of the software developers themselves. Software development is a suitable field to explore the use of business intelligence in workload planning and monitor-ing because of the diversity of tasks and project environment that is common in software development.

The factors affecting business intelligence acceptance are to a large extent similar as the factors affecting the acceptance of new technologies in general: personal factors, technologi-cal factors, social factors and organizational factors usually play a role. Among software developers the most important seem to be technological and personal factors while social and organizational factors do not play a big role among software developers.

Software developers recognized the importance of planning and monitoring their work at least on some level and found a business intelligence system to be a fairly suitable tool for this. Named advantages of a business intelligence system included for example visual and specifically designed interfaces, ability to analyze data, possibility to learn from the analyt-ics provided by the business intelligence system, time savings in weekly meetings and keep-ing up to date on the work situation of colleagues. The most notable disadvantage that was named was the current lack of real time connections to a source system as well as the extra time inputting data takes. As a whole, all the software developers agreed that a business intelligence system was a good option for planning and monitoring workloads and preferred it to using Excel spreadsheet