Thanks Jack. The link is very informative. But can Maturity model can be one of the  basis to profile BI systems?

I have only skimmed through the studies below:

Elbashir, M. Z., Collier, P. A., & Davern, M. J. (2008). Measuring the effects of business intelligence systems: The relationship between business process and organizational performance. International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 9(3), 135-153.

Popovič, A., Coelho, P. S., & Jaklič, J. (2009). The impact of business intelligence system maturity on information quality. Information research, 14(4).

Ranjan, J. (2008). Business justification with business intelligence. Vine, 38(4), 461-475.

Gibson, M., Arnott, D., Jagielska, I., & Melbourne, A. (2004). Evaluating the intangible benefits of business intelligence: Review & research agenda. In Proceedings of the 2004 IFIP International Conference on Decision Support Systems (DSS2004): Decision Support in an Uncertain and Complex World (pp. 295-305). Prato, Italy.

Pirttimäki, V., Lönnqvist, A., & Karjaluoto, A. (2006). Measurement of business intelligence in a Finnish telecommunications company. The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, 4(1), 83-90.

Hočevar, B., & Jaklič, J. (2008). Assessing benefits of business intelligence systems–a case study. Management: Journal of Contemporary Management Issues, 13(2 (Special issue)), 87-119.

Good Luck.

Thanks Daryn. I will check them out.

Jack, 

As per Wikipedia, Business intelligence as it is understood today is said to have evolved from the decision support systems (DSS) that began in the 1960s and developed throughout the mid-1980s. DSS originated in the computer-aided models created to assist with decision making and planning. From DSS, data warehouses, Executive Information Systems, OLAP and business intelligence came into focus beginning in the late 80s.

Though the term business intelligence is sometimes a synonym for competitive intelligence (because they both support decision making), BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors. If understood broadly, business intelligence can include the subset of competitive intelligence.

Business intelligence and business analytics are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are alternate definitions.

In an alternate definition, Thomas Davenport, professor of information technology and management at Babson College argues that business intelligence should be divided into querying, reporting, Online analytical processing (OLAP), an "alerts" tool, and business analytics.

So now if i want to classify BI systems what criteria\benchmark\model should i adopt.

The first thing you need to do is to define what you mean with BI, there are many different interpretations of BI. One example is when Negash (2004) writes that

“in this paper BI systems are defined as follows: BI systems combine data gathering, data storage, and knowledge management with analytical tools to present complex internal and competitive information to planners and decision makers.”

Some consider BI to be equal to management information systems (MIS), business analytics (BA), and decision support systems (DSS) and more or less be a catchy new term for something old. Chen et al. (2012) for example use business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) as a unified term. Some companies are now abandoning using the word BI and replace it with BA, some states there is a difference between BI and BA others that it is not, see:

http://timoelliott.com/blog/2011/03/business-analytics-vs-business-intelligence.html

http://peterjamesthomas.com/2009/03/28/business-analytics-vs-business-intelligence/

http://www.bisoftwareinsight.com/business-intelligence-vs-business-analytics/

BI research covers many different topics that can be seen in a review by Jourdan et al. (2008) and research has probably not converged since that time, instead diverged into further topics. I think that BA research will gain terrain since it is connected to ‘Big Data’ that is a hot research topic and selling word for companies and consultants.

Good luck with your research!

Jourdan, Z., Rainer, R.K., Marshall, T.E. (2008). Business intelligence: An analysis of the literature. Information Systems Management, 25 (2), 121-131.

Chen, H., Chiang, R. H., & Storey, V. C. (2012). Business Intelligence and Analytics: From Big Data to Big Impact. MIS quarterly, 36(4), 1165-1188.

Negash, Solomon (2004) "Business Intelligence," Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 13, Article 15.

Article Business Intelligence: An Analysis of the Literature 1

Article Business Intelligence