Abstract
The objective of this study is to find the key success factors for business intelligence (BI) market in Japan. First, the key factors for choosing a BI product were estimated by interviews with several customers of each BI vendor. The results showed that the characteristics of products (including both software and consulting services provided by BI vendors) were the most important for customers, compared with other factors such as prices, deliveries or trade records in the past. Second, the dynamics of “product architecture” of BI software and consulting services were analyzed in order to find how the superiority of winners’ products was established. The results indicated that the dynamics of winners’ architectures had following three features: (1) the architecture of both software and consulting services were “closed” at first, (2) the architecture of consulting services had firstly changed from “closed” to “open”, and (3) the architecture of software had secondly changed from “closed” to “open”. On the other hand, the architectures of losers’ products had opposite dynamics: firstly software’s architecture had firstly become “open”, and then services’ architecture had secondly been “open”. Those results indicated the differences of the dynamics of product architecture can be dominant factors for success in BI market.
