Frontiers of Business Intelligence and Analytics

Three research methods are currently underrepresented in BI & A 3.0 research: Grounded theory, Ethnography and Action research. The grounded theory methodology and action research is commonly known and often applied in general IS research. Surprisingly, these methodologies are largely underrepresented for BI & A 3.0 results. Ethnographies are applied quite seldom and the low usage of this methodology is expectable. Califf and Stumpf report about a scant use of this qualitative research method and argue with vague methodological details, an unfocussed and unsystematic data collection, a heavy time consumption, and missing sense-making of the findings. We further found out that solely 11 out of 75 papers evaluated its artifact in a real-world setting, which brings us to the assumption that many research outcomes have no or only little practical relevance. At the same time, organizations highly demand for solutions that could be implemented to increase the diffusion of big data technologies to handle the data sources available and to potentially create competitive advantage. Filling this gap means focusing on practical evaluations of research artifacts.

Applying a Grounded theory approach to develop a theoretical model for the influence of health tracking apps on pharmaceutical sales could be a fruitful research work that provides practical relevance. In addition, we suggest conducting a data analysis of relevant social media data for predicting purchase intentions to evaluate the theoretical model. Thus, we encourage answering the question: Does the usage of health tracking apps influence the revenue and sales of pharmaceutical products (4)?

In the area of Smart health, the analysis of language usage and its change over time might reveal insights into probabilities of certain diseases, which leads to the question: How can diseases be predicted through the analysis of spoken words (5). In a first step, we suggest building up a deeper understanding of the usage of language and voice and its relationship with a certain health status. Therefore, it is meaningful to conduct an Ethnography. In a second step, an analysis model needs to be trained that receives a voice stream and labeled disease data sets as input.

Action research might be a beneficial research method for increasing the practical evaluation of BI & A 3.0 artifacts. The method has a high potential to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Especially in combination with the application area E-government and politics many research opportunities exist. We suggest analyzing the speeches of politicians to predict its success and effects based on data of former speeches and its resulting social media reactions. Text analytics combined with an Action research approach is a promising combination for that investigation. Accordingly, we suggest answering the question: How to predict the success of political speeches based on social media reactions (6).