Business intelligence information systems success : a South African study.

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) systems hold promise for improving organisational decision making in South Africa. Additionally, BI systems have become increasingly important over the past few decades and are one of the top spending priority areas of most organisations. Yet till now, the factors influencing the success of BI systems in South Africa have not been fully investigated. The study found no scholarly research for managers and other practitioners to assess post implementation success of BI systems in South Africa. This lack of research may directly affect managers’ not knowing how best to implement BI systems and could thereby delay the successful implementation of BI systems in South African organisations. The study extends that of DeLone and McLean (2003), conducted in developed economies by applying it to a developing economy context, namely South Africa. The DeLone and McLean (2003) model has been widely utilised to study factors that influence information systems (IS) success. This study extends the DeLone and McLean (2003) by adding a user quality factor and suggests a theoretical model consisting of six factors, which are: (1) system quality, (2) service quality, (3) information quality, (4) user satisfaction, (5) individual impact, (6) and user quality. The theoretical model was formulated from the literature review. It was then validated and enhanced through a qualitative study of three interviews with end users of BI systems based in South Africa. The theoretical model was then presented to a panel of experts for verification. A questionnaire survey method was employed as the main method to collect data and to answer the main research question. Statistical analysis methods and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) with SPSS was used to analyse the data. The results of the hypotheses were mixed. Three suggested that relationships were statistically significant, while the other four did not. The study finds that information quality is significantly and positively related to user satisfaction in a BI system. The results also indicate that user quality is positively related to user satisfaction in a BI system and system quality is positively related to individual impact in a BI system. The results have both managerial and research implications. The results of this study will add value to IS and specifically BI literature. Organisations, which have adopted BI or are planning to adopt BI, can use the important variables of the study to undertake an internal check to find out how they compare in terms of these variables. The unique contribution of this study is the identification of post implementation success factors of BI systems in a South African context. The factors identified also served in providing a set of management guidelines for the BI environment in South Africa.