BI impact: The assimilation of business intelligence into core business process

Leading proponents of business-driven business intelligence (BI) design and development methods have recognized that the BI payoff is created through improved or reengineered core business processes from BI investments (Williams and Williams 2006) , but until now there has been no rigorous empirical data to validate that perspective. As a result of this void, companies in a wide range of industries have struggled to make the business case for BI and have failed to drive BI use into the core business processes that help create business value. To broaden our understanding of how BI creates business value, two empirical studies were conducted at the University of Melbourne (Elbashir, 2007, Elbashir, Collier and Davern 2007). Among their findings: • The assimilation of business intelligence systems (BIS) into business strategies and activities of organizations delivers business benefits, or BI impact • Improved business process performance, enabled by BIS, can improve organizational performance We call these improvements in business process performance and organizational performance BI impact. In this article we examine the management implications of BI impact on how BI is designed, justified, and managed.