Assimilation of business intelligence: The effect of external pressures and top leaders commitment during pandemic crisis

Abstract

The business intelligence (BI) has been often touted as a game-changer especially during the pandemic crisis. Although most managers are familiar with BI and agree that, it should be operationalized across their organizations. The BI is not well assimilated throughout adopting organizations. Rooted in institutional and upper echelon theories, this study proposes a theoretical model aimed toward explaining BI assimilation. We surveyed 174 respondents occupying leadership positions from174 auto-components manufacturing firms in India to gather data. The findings suggest that normative and mimetic (but not coercive) factors significantly influence top leader’s commitment to the BI initiatives. We found that the commitment of the top leaders influences the assimilation of BI via acceptance and routinization. Our study is an attempt to address the previous research calls related to BI assimilation. The findings of the study inform the information management scholars via theory-based research on phenomena related to post-adoption BI diffusion during a pandemic crisis. Practitioners can utilize the results of our study to design their policies that help assimilate BI such that forecasted benefits can be fully realized during an uncertain time.