Building Business Intelligence & Analytics Capabilities - A Work System Perspective

Although enterprises believe that they can achieve a competitive advantage with big data and AI, their analytics initiatives’ success rate still lags behind expectations. Existing research reveals that value creation with business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) is a complex process with multiple stages between the initial investments in BI&A resources and ultimately obtaining value. While prior research mostly focused on value generation mechanisms, we still lack a thorough understanding of how enterprises actually build BI&A capabilities. We explain the process in our research using work system theory (WST). Based on case studies and focus groups, we identify four prevalent BI&A capabilities: reporting, data exploration, analytics experimentation, and analytics production. For each identified BI&A capability, we derive patterns for BI&A resource orchestration, using the WST lens. Our findings complement the BI&A value creation research stream by providing insights into capability building