Lessons from BI in Public Institutions
The study in this article provides reasons why BI is not fully implemented in some organizations. The thematic approach to determining why the technological tools are or are not used by managers provides an actionable set of areas where improvements can be made. One aspect that may relate to our discussions on asking the right questions is, "do managers really need to know how to use BI tools?" In many organizations, managers have enough knowledge about specialized data and tools to know how to task their specialists (BI analysts, in this case) to use them to answer their requirements. This can give analysts too much power in organizations with poor systems, whose data quality is questionable, or with authoritarian cultures where analysts fear giving the "wrong" answer. But in a highly effective environment, managers manage, and analysts analyze.
Introduction
Many studies portray business intelligence (BI) as impactful systems for decision-making in organisations, particularly in highly competitive environments. The positive impact is much higher and valuable when relevant technologies that align people, processes, and technology are deployed. The advancement of business intelligence and data analytics has enhanced the performance of management systems through uncovering complex patterns and relationships that support strategic planning.
There exist definitional variances of BI in the literature. For the purposes of this study, the definition of Stackowiak, Rayman, and Greenwald is adopted. They define BI as the process of taking large amounts of data, analysing that data, and presenting a high-level set of reports that condense the essence of that data into the basis of business actions, enabling management to make fundamental daily business decisions.
This article recognises that public organisations in many developing countries face challenges in adopting business intelligence and data analytics. The challenges relate to business processes and human presence in the information technology (IT) ecosystems (people, process, and technology). A public organisation in South Africa is examined to empirically identify the inhibiting factors to business intelligence use by managers at all levels. SAP Business Intelligence (SAP BI) tools have been deployed throughout the organisation to provide reports for decision-making in all functional areas, such as finance, human resources, logistics, real estate, customer relations management, supply chain, industry utility solutions, public sector records management, etc. However, based on statistical data of logon details, one can conclude that the usage of analytics amongst managers is low.
It is likely that the organisation will lose its competitive advantage and experience a negative impact on efficiency and service delivery if managers do not make use of analytics in strategic decision-making. From this background, the central question which this study sought to answer is: what are the specific factors that inhibit management usage of analytics in public organisations?
In seeking to answer the research question, the study contributes towards the existing body of knowledge as it provides insights into specific reasons that inhibit management usage of business intelligence and how this impacts management decision-making in public organisations.
The article is organised as follows: the next section presents the literature review on business intelligence and the conceptual framework of the study, followed by the methodology adopted. The section that follows presents usage of business intelligence in two phases: quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. Finally, the article presents the study's recommendations and conclusions.