Philip A. Collier

Measuring the effects of business intelligence systems: The relationship between business process and organizational performance

Business intelligence (BI) systems provide the ability to analyse business information in order to support and improve management decision making across a broad range of business activities. They leverage the large data infrastructure investments (e.g. ERP systems) made by firms, and have the potential to realise the substantial value locked up in a firms data resources. While substantial business investment in BI systems is continuing to accelerate, there is a complete absence of a specific and rigorous method to measure the realised business value, if any. By exploiting the lessons learned from prior attempts to measure business value of IT-intensive systems, we develop a new measure that is based on an understanding of the characteristics of BI systems in a process-oriented framework. We then employ the measure in an examination of the relationship between the business process performance and organizational performance, finding significant differences in the strength of the relationship between industry sectors. This study reinforces the need to consider the specific context of use when designing performance measurement for IT-intensive systems, and highlights the need for further research examining contextual moderators to the realisation of such performance benefits.

Enhancing the Business Value of Business Intelligence: The Role of Shared Knowledge and Assimilation

ABSTRACT: Business intelligence (BI) systems have attracted significant interest from senior executives and consultants for their ability to exploit organizational data and provide operational and strategic benefits through improved management control systems. A large body of literature indicates that organizations have largely failed to use their business intelligence investments effectively to exploit the wealth of data they capture in their ERP systems. As a result, BI has too often failed to support organizations managerial decision making at both the strategic and operational levels and, thus, failed to enhance business value. Whether and how organizations achieve business benefits from their BI investments remains unclear. This study draws on the strategic alignment and IT assimilation literature to develop a research model that theorizes the importance of BI systems assimilation, and the need for shared knowledge among the strategic and operational levels as the drivers of BI business value. Resul...

Explanation Provision and Use in an Intelligent Decision Aid

Intelligent decision aids have been widely adopted by organizations in an effort to capture, retain and disseminate the knowledge of individuals within the organization. To date, these efforts have met with mixed results. Two primary limitations have been the usability of systems (users either cannot or do not wish to use systems) and the inability to transfer knowledge from such systems to less expert decision makers. Explanation capabilities have been perceived as a potential means for improving the effectiveness of such systems in terms of both usability and knowledge transfer. In this study, four advancements are put forth. First, a working prototype system for highly complex decision making is used as the foundation for implementing a full-scale, embedded explanation facility. Second, the development of the explanation facility is carefully grounded in the extant prescriptive literature on explanation types and delivery processes—including feedforward and feedback. Third, a development strategy is formulated and demonstrated as a generalized process of explanation development and integration. Fourth, high-level professional decision makers use the system and provide evaluative feedback on the usability and value of the explanation facility. Overall, the results of the development efforts and subsequent evaluation are very positive and provide a solid foundation for future research and practice efforts related to explanation provision within the context of intelligent systems. Copyright

INCASE: SIMULATING EXPERIENCE TO ACCELERATE EXPERTISE DEVELOPMENT BY KNOWLEDGE WORKERS

SUMMARY n nINCASE, a web-based electronic learning (e-learning) environment, has been built to enable rapid expertise development in novice-level professional knowledge workers. This paper describes the theoretical underpinnings (constructivist epistemology) behind INCASE and uses a design science methodology to describe its design, construction, instantiation, and validation. The INCASE system addresses a fundamental problem in knowledge worker domains where experience is a necessary component of expertise development and a barrier to the rapid development of domain experts. Copyright

Unveiling the black box of human-computer interaction: The need for replay process tracing in decision aid research

The extant accounting behavioral research related to decision aid impacts on users decision-making has been limited over time due to the focus on decision outcomes to the neglect of the underlying decision processes and strategies. A primary barrier in moving the decision aid literature forward into the exploration of the black boxof human-computer interaction is the paucity of methods for accurately capturing the interaction process. This paper presents a conceptualization of a technique we refer to as replay process tracing that allows the researcher to recreate the precise session that a user has participated in with a decision aid. We subsequently operationalize this conceptualization through a working prototype model with advanced replay process tracing functionality.