Key Themes for Multi-Stage Business Analytics Adoption in Organizations

Abstract

Business analytics is a management tool for achieving significant business performance improvements. Many organizations fail to or only partially achieve their business objectives and goals from business analytics. Business analytics adoption is a multi-stage complex activity consisting of evaluation, adoption, and assimilation stages. Several research papers have been published in the field of business analytics, but the research on multi-stage BA adoption is fewer in number. This study contributes to the scant literature on the multi-stage adoption model by identifying the critical themes for evaluation, adoption, and assimilation stages of business analytics. This study uses the thematic content analysis of peer-reviewed published academic papers as a research technique to explore the key themes of business analytics adoption. This study links the critical themes with the popular theoretical foundations: Resource-Based View (RBV), Dynamic Capabilities, Diffusion of Innovations, and Technology-Organizational-Environmental (TOE) framework. The study identifies twelve major factors categorized into three key themes: organizational characteristics, innovation characteristics, and environmental characteristics. The main organizational factors are top management support, organization data environment, centralized analytics structure, perceived cost, employee skills, and data-based decision making culture. The major innovation characteristics are perceived benefits, complexity, and compatibility, and information technology assets. The environmental factors influencing BA adoption stages are competition and industry pressure. A conceptual framework for the multi-stage BA adoption model is proposed in this study. The findings of this study can assist the practicing managers in developing a stage-wise operational strategy for business analytics adoption. Future research can also attempt to validate the conceptual model proposed in this study.