An Empirical Investigation On Business Intelligence Use In Budgeting

This empirical study addresses the research questions of how and why BI is used or not used to support the flexibility and integration needs in budgeting. Budgeting is considered a process with four main activities namely budget construction, budget consolidation, budget monitoring and budget reporting which belong equally to the flexibility and integration domains. Empirical data is obtained from business controllers in seven companies in Thailand which use BI in their budgeting processes. The result from the flexibility domain shows that BI constrains business controllers to achieve the flexibility required to support budget construction and budget reporting. The result from the integration domain shows that an improper enterprise architecture design causes a BI non-use to support budget consolidation and budget monitoring. The analysis concludes that BI non-use occurs from two reasons. First, BI cannot support flexibility in budgeting. Second, BI faces integration limitations due to improper enterprise architecture design. This study contributes to the AIS research in three ways. It contributes to the limited empirical BI research. It urges academia and practitioners to consider BI initiatives in a more critical manner. It observes that BI use for decision-making needs to be complemented with spreadsheets.