This Ph.D. thesis is concerned with the role of the business intelligence (BI) output in
organizational decision-making processes. The primary focus of this thesis is to
investigate how this BI output is employed and deployed by decision-makers to shape
collective judgement and to reach organizational decisions. Concerning the role of the
BI output in decision-making the BI literature is characterized by normative ideas of
how the BI output should be used in decision-making and how it can enable people to
make better decisions. Most previous work has concerned methods and technologies to
collect, store and analyze BI. It has also, assumed a rational approach to decision
making where data from information systems are used to inform decisions either by
reducing uncertainty, ambiguity or complexity.
This study attempts to establish knowledge about the role of the BI output in the IT
project prioritization process of the Group IT of the Danske Bank Group. Hence, the
starting point of this thesis is a 16-month long interpretive study from March 2010 till
July 2011 during which I observed the prioritization process and collected various
forms of data. I use a rich dataset built from this longitudinal study of the IT project
prioritization process in Group IT where thematic analysis is used to analyze the data.
Overall, the study operates under the interpretive paradigm, which assumes that the
world and knowledge are socially constructed