Martin Kretzer

Designing a Report Recommendation Assistant: A First Design Cycle

Employees often supplement their organizations Business Intelligence BI system with individually tinkered reports. Unfortunately, these supplements bear numerous threats such as limited report reuse across all users of the BI system. Therefore, we established a design science research DSR project by exploring impediments of existing BI systems, building meta-requirements and suggesting design principles. In particular, we propose a Report Recommendation Assistant RRA for improving reuse of reports across potential users. In this paper, we present our DSR project and focus on the first evaluation cycle. Our results indicate that the RRA has a positive impact on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the BI system. Furthermore, we find that these effects are negatively moderated by users expertise in using the BI system and are not biased by the underlying BI system. Finally, we leverage results from BI expert interviews and existing literature to refine the proposed RRA.

Linking Report Individualization and Report Standardization: A Configurational Perspective

Many organizations are facing the challenge that employees supplement their standardized Accounting Information Systems (AIS) with individually tinkered spreadsheets or other types of workaround systems. While such supplements provide employees with the flexibility to adjust the AIS to their individual preferences and to respond quickly to new opportunities, these supplements also cause adverse effects such as data redundancy, limited report reuse, loss of economic scale effects, and loss of compliance with regulatory and supervisory reporting requirements. To provide organizations with a model for balancing report standardization and report individualization, I explore and analyse the AIS of four organizations. Specifically, I adopt a configurational perspective to examine two AIS use processes simultaneously: report standardization and report individualization. The resulting model indicates the need for an iterative approach which supports discussion and feedback on individualized reports and views individualized reports as prototypes for standardized reports. I conclude may work by discussing the value and limitations of the model and research design.