The role of business analytics in supporting strategy processes: Opportunities and limitations

Abstract

Many organisations consider business analytics to be a key organisational capability. To date, there is little evidence on how organisations have included analytics at the heart of their strategy processes. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the activities within a strategy process and considering the potential role that business analytics might play in providing support to such processes. We perform a search in multidisciplinary databases for evidence of the use of business analytics within strategy processes and we reflect on its use in two case studies performing strategic analysis within the pharmaceutical industry. The findings indicate business analytics is still an emerging field without a structured approach. Business analytics can provide important data-driven insights into strategy processes; we therefore recommend its further integration with other traditional OR and strategy tools in order to support strategic decision-makers.