Business Intelligence and the Performance of Kenya Power

Abstract

Imagine you are getting in to a plane for a cross Atlantic flight and you happen to notice that the pilot’s dashboard has no instrumentations at all i.e. no flight path, no altitude, no fire detection, no fuel gauge. Would you board that flight or trust that pilot with your life? This is the problem present C-level management face every day and an organization’s performance and ultimate survival is greatly determined by their ability to make effective decisions.Although the opinion about business intelligence and its creation of business value is generally accepted, economic justification of investments into business intelligence systems is not always clear. Measuring the business value of business intelligence in practice is often not carried out due to the lack of measurement methods and resources. In this study we endeavor to measure this value empirically and our focus was Kenya Power (KP) a quasi government agency with a monopoly on electricity distribution whose operations directly impact almost everyone in the country. Through a questionnaire we established that considerable organizational management support is required in the choice of tool & implementation and it is equally important to ensure that the software and the vendor are very carefully selected. Unanimous feedback from the interviewee’s affirmed that benefits i.e. cost reduction, employee motivation, efficiency in customer service etc therefore businesses need to utilize business intelligence tools. We further proposed that KP should invest more in customer service & experience as well as adopt other BI enhancements like Data Warehousing and Big data solutions. Additional research will help in identifying an effective evaluation processes linking BI solutions to business output and thereby provide a numerical ROI that can support the initial investment.