Business Analytics: Enabling Strategic Alignment and organisational Transformation

Business analytics systems can potentially create value and provide competitive advantage to organisations. We argue that business analytics systems can also enable alignment between business strategy and IT strategy and support organisational transformation. We explain how a data warehouse, standardised metrics and global reporting supported the strategic transformation of a diversified and multi-layered international mining company to a unified and integrated global organisation. We identify a number of factors critical to the success of the business analytics initiative and to strategic alignment and organisational transformation, including: the early definition of globally standard metrics and dimensions; a high quality technology infrastructure and high quality data; sustained senior management support together with strong leadership within the business analytics project; effective governance structures that support change management and continual renewal of business analytics capabilities; and hybrid people with a mix of technical, business and strong communication skills. A number of implications of the study are discussed and suggestions for future work are provided.