Factors influencing the quality of decision-making using business intelligence in Hulamin-KZN.

Abstract

The current study sought to investigate the factors that affect decision-making by use of business intelligence (BI). Specifically, the study was focused on information quality, system quality and BI service quality. Business intelligence uses organisational data, performs analytical functions and provides decision makers with high quality information to support decision-making. This quantitative study, based on the researcher’s experience of BI, was carried out in a selected manufacturing organisation which recently implemented business intelligence in KwaZulu-Natal. The study used a self-administered survey sent out to participants who used business intelligence so as to gather data on their perception of these variables on the quality of decision-making. All the employees of the organisation with sufficient report runs made the population of the study. The collected data came from different levels of employees, namely managers (47%) and nonmanagers (53%) with varying levels of BI experience. The results were imported into SPSS for analysis. The data showed that information quality had a positive significant impact on the quality of decision-making; system quality had a positive significant impact on the quality of decisionmaking; and BI service had a positive significant impact on the quality of decision- making. Thereafter, a conducted multiple linear regression analysis to determine the strength of these variances in influencing decision-making revealed that the three variables explained 65.7% of the variance in the quality of decision-making. Overall, the study found that high quality information, coupled with a high-quality system and good BI service, leads to a higher quality of decisionmaking, and that the impact of BI on decision-making is positive. This finding concurs reviewed literature.