Högskolan i Skövde

Implementing Business Intelligence solutions has fundamentally changed how many large organizations conduct their business. This is well understood in the scholarly literature but the adoption of BI within small or medium sized enterprises has, on the other hand, received little attention. Given the importance of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the economy, the scarcity of research in this area can be viewed as a problem. Thus, the aim of this work is to explore the BI-commitment in smaller-sized organizations and investigate how far they have proceeded in putting business analytics in action.

In order to shed light on BI-implementation in the context of smaller organizations, in-depth interviews were conducted with representatives of four organizations within the Skaraborg district of Sweden. The initial objective of the research project was to explore several focal areas in order to establish the current state-of-practice. This provided the groundwork for further investigation on how SMEs approach BI. Further work involved the use of two theoretical frameworks to analyze organizational commitment and analytical maturity within the focal areas.

The main findings in this work are that the organizational commitment to implement BI infrastructure is high among participating companies, but the use of analytics is nevertheless limited to few specific areas. The high ambition of managers to implement BI infrastructure can be the key to further develop the use of business analytics.  This work adds valuable insights for various stakeholders within the community and to others that want to have an idea of the current status of BI within SMEs in Sweden.