The Impact of Strategy and Maturity on Business Analytics and Firm Performance: A Review and Research Agenda

Business analytics involves interpreting organizational data to improve decision-making and to optimise business processes. It has the potential to improve firm performance and increase competitive advantage. Although many case studies have been reported that describe business analytics applications and speculate about how they might contribute to firm performance, there is no clearly articulated and theoretically grounded model in the literature. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how and why business analytics technology and capabilities can lead to value-creating actions that lead to improved form performance and competitive advantage. We focus particularly on how strategy and maturity impact business analytics and firm performance. A number of propositions are developed from the framework and a research agenda for empirical evaluation and enhancement of the framework is proposed.