Senior Executive Information Behaviors and Decision Support: A Research Agenda

Business intelligence (BI) is currently the top technology priority of chief information officers (CIOs) and is a major growth area of business IT. BI systems are the IT-based systems that have the greatest impact on organizational strategy. Unfortunately, BI projects are subject to high failure rates and those that are implemented suffer from a utilization problem where only 10 to 20% of intended users actually use the systems. Most decision support systems (DSS) and BI research and practice treats managers as a homogenous group, but management research reports differences between senior executives and other levels of management, and individual differences between managers. This is a significantly more complex development environment than that assumed by current DSS and BI research. There are no specialist methods for analyzing the decision support requirements of senior executives. This paper discusses the rationale and design of a research project that uses a design-science strategy that aims to develop and test such a method. The method will be based on a sound understanding of senior executive information behaviors.