A service-dominant logic approach to business intelligence

Abstract

Although Business Intelligence (BI) is highly promoted and praised, organisations implementing a BI solution do not always achieve expected benefits. Instead, numerous reports of failed BI implementations and challenges prevail. Even organisations indicating they receive benefit from their BI solutions strive for improvement in BI. This highlights a need for BI to improve and for it to overcome its challenges. In response, this thesis proposes a paradigm shift for BI. It provides a literature and case study, representing an interpretive enquiry using a qualitative research approach. The case study is set within a large South African bank, extending to BI vendors providing BI solutions to the bank. Two scenarios are used to compare the views of BI providers and BI customers. In one scenario, the bank’s internal BI departments represent the BI provider view, providing BI to other departments within the bank as their BI customers. In the other scenario, the BI vendors represent the BI provider view and the BI customer view is represented by the bank’s BI departments as well as other internal bank departments – who are also the BI customers of the BI departments. The thesis starts by identifying BI’s prevailing challenges, highlighting the restrictive tendency evident within BI literature and practice whereby typical Information System (IS) challenges are raised as BI challenges. Challenges are then examined to understand their BI-specific aspects and to identify a list of BI’s prevailing challenges. The thesis then examines current measures proposed to address BI’s challenges, establishing that these are largely ineffective. Rather than attempt to resolve BI’s challenges in the same manner as previous attempts do, this thesis then analyses BI at a conceptual level to reveal a common worldview of BI held by BI practitioners and academics. It is identified that this common worldview is predominantly based on a Goods-Dominant (G-D) Logic, resulting in many of BI’s challenges. A suggestion is made to shift this worldview to a Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic. Although S-D Logic is not a new lens, it has not yet been explicitly applied to BI or a BI-related discipline at a conceptual level, offering the opportunity to examine BI from a new perspective wherein new insights to address BI’s persistent challenges emerge.