Saji K Mathew

In the backdrop of growing adoption of business analytics in various business domains, it is important for investing firms to understand how business value is created from the investments. Earlier studies conducted in IT domain have highlighted how higher investment in technology may not bring more returns, rather how IT as a capability built by the organization acts as a key mediator in the business value creation. This research extends the model to business analytics, first to identify elements of underlying concepts like analytics technology assets and analytics capability, using a case study approach. This research further captures how analytics resources contribute to business performance by developing suitable operational and organizational measures for performance. This research contributes to the body of knowledge related to business analytics in the form of theory building.

With increasing maturity of analytical software tools, many companies deploy at least basic forms of business analytics to improve data-based decision making. Research about analytics in the field of information systems is currently scarce. While existing work primarily focused on capabilities for successful implementations, no attention has been paid to the role of the IT department. The goal of this paper is to explore and validate different roles of how the IT unit contributes to business value for business analytics. The proposed research model draws from the resource-based view and IT management theory. It provides a comprehensive summary of critical resources that are derived from literature. Preliminary results of case studies with nine CIOs and senior IT executives confirm the presence of four typological profiles for the IT. In a next step, we plan to formulate hypothesizes and empirically validate the model.

With growing adoption of business analytics, it is important for investing firms to understand how business value is created from investments. Studies in IT domain have highlighted how higher investment in technology may not bring more returns, rather how IT as an organizational capability acts as a key mediator in value creation. This research extends the model to business analytics, to identify elements of analytics technology assets and business analytics capability and to understand the mechanism of business value creation using multiple case studies. We capture how analytics resources contribute to business performance by developing operational and organizational performance measures.