The Impact of Business Intelligence Tools on Performance: A User Satisfaction Paradox?

While Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives have been a top-priority of CIOs around the worldfor several years, accounting for billions of USD of IT investments per annum (IDC), academicresearch on the actual benefits derived from BI tools and the drivers of these benefits remainsparse.This paper reports the findings of an exploratory, cross-sectional field study investigatingthe factors that define and drive benefits associated with the deployment of dedicated BI tools.BI is broadly defined as an analytical process which transforms fragmented data ofenterprises and markets into action-oriented information or knowledge about objectives,opportunities and positions of an organization; BI tools are software products primarilydesigned and deployed to support this analytical process (e.g. data warehouse software, datamining software, digital dashboards applications).Building upon DeLoneand McLean’s (1992; 2002; 2003) information systems successmodel, we develop, test and refine a BI quality and performance model adapted for the specificpurpose, application, user group and technology of BI tools. The ultimate performancepredictors in this model are user satisfaction and the impact of BI tools on managerial decisionquality, both of which are determined by data quality.Partial Least Square (PLS) modeling is used to analyze data collected in a surveyadministered to IT executives of large Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) listed companies.The results confirm some of the theoretical relationships established in – especially theoriginal – DeLone-McLean model in the specific context of BI. More importantly, the resultsalso confirm the important role of explicit BI management as antecedent of benefits derived fromBI tools, and the key impact of data quality on managerial decision making and organizationalperformance.However, the results also reveal a ‘user satisfaction paradox’: In contrast to thepredictions derived from the DeLone-McLean model, organizational performance is negativelyassociated with user satisfaction with BI tools. Financial performance data collected for ex-post verification of this unexpected result confirm this paradox. We discuss BI-specificinterpretations of these unexpected findings and provide avenues for future research

Einfuehrung in Workflow-Management-Systeme

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Informationsschrift zum Fachgebiet Wirtschaftsinformatik und Operations Research

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Geschaeftsprozessmodellierung: Tagungsband 29.09.1995

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Methoden und Verfahren des Data Mining

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Praktikum Management-Informations-Systeme (MIS)

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