Abstract
PurposeThe business intelligence (BI) research witnessed a proliferation of contributions during the past three decades, yet the knowledge about the interdependencies between the BI process and organizational context is scant. This has resulted in a proliferation of fragmented literature duplicating identical endeavors. Although such pluralism expands the understanding of the idiosyncrasies of BI conceptualizations, attributes and characteristics, it cannot cumulate existing contributions to better advance the BI body of knowledge. In response, this study aims to provide an integrative framework that integrates the interrelationships across the BI process and its organizational context and outlines the covered research areas and the underexplored ones.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews 120 articles spanning the course of 35 years of research on BI process, antecedents and outcomes published in top tier ABS ranked journals.FindingsBuilding on a process framework, this review identifies major patterns and contradictions across eight dimensions, namely, environmental antecedents; organizational antecedents; managerial and individual antecedents; BI process; strategic outcomes; firm performance outcomes; decision-making; and organizational intelligence. Finally, the review pinpoints to gaps in linkages across the BI process, its antecedents and outcomes for future researchers to build upon.Practical implicationsThis review carries some implications for practitioners and particularly the role they ought to play should they seek actionable intelligence as an outcome of the BI process. Across the studies this review examined, managerial reluctance to open their intelligence practices to close examination was omnipresent. Although their apathy is understandable, due to their frustration regarding the lack of measurability of intelligence constructs, managers manifestly share a significant amount of responsibility in turning out explorative and descriptive studies partly due to their defensive managerial participation. Interestingly, managers would rather keep an ineffective BI unit confidential than open it for assessment in fear of competition or bad publicity. Therefore, this review highlights the value open participation of managers in longitudinal studies could bring to the BI research and by extent the new open intelligence culture across their organizations where knowledge is overt, intelligence is participative, not selective and where double loop learning alongside scholars is continuous. Their commitment to open participation and longitudinal studies will help generate new research that better integrates the BI process within its context and fosters new measures for intelligence performance.Originality/valueThis study provides an integrative framework that integrates the interrelationships across the BI process and its organizational context and outlines the covered research areas and the underexplored ones. By so doing, the developed framework sets the ground for scholars to further develop insights within each dimension and across their interrelationships.
Highlights
The business intelligence (BI) process research has grown exponentially during the past three decades into a fragmented state drawing from a diverse set of studies with widely different contributions (Talaoui and Kohtamäki, 2020)
This study provides an integrative framework that integrates the interrelationships across the BI process and its organizational context and outlines the covered research areas and the underexplored ones
This pluralism is necessary for the BI process research to generate momentum from insightful findings, it can yield a disjointed theoretical progress if it lacks proper literature reviews that uncover what is already known and set a direction for the way ahead (Hart, 1998; Rowe, 2014)
Summary
The business intelligence (BI) process research has grown exponentially during the past three decades into a fragmented state drawing from a diverse set of studies with widely different contributions (Talaoui and Kohtamäki, 2020). The stock of previous reviews on BI research focused on its attributes and conceptualization (Ekbia et al, 2015), its methodologies and research strategies (Jourdan et al, 2008), its application to operations models (Roden et al, 2017), its contribution to business value (Trieu, 2017) or decisionmaking (Mora et al, 2005), its dimensions and taxonomy (Holsapple et al, 2014), its usage (Watson and Wixom, 2007), its field development (Arnott and Pervan, 2005, 2014; Toit, 2015), its attitudes (Rouach and Santi, 2001), its characteristics and applications (Chen et al, 2012; Eom and Kim, 2006; Moro et al, 2015), its technologies and challenges (Shim et al, 2002; Sivarajah et al, 2017) and its trends (Watson, 2009) To this date, no literature review has examined the BI process and its interrelationships with the organizational context. We follow other scholars’ conceptualization of BI process as an integrative sequence that encompasses the collection, transformation and usage (Chen et al, 2012; Davenport and Paul Barth, 2012; Trieu, 2017) that occurs in an organizational context, exerts an influence upon it and is shaped by its antecedents (Bingham and Eisenhardt, 2011; Loock and Hinnen, 2015)
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