Assimilation of business intelligence: The effect of external pressures and top leaders commitment during pandemic crisis

Highlights

• Examined effects of institutional pressures on assimilation of business intelligence.

• Integration of institutional theory and upper echelon theory.

• Empirical study based on the Indian automotive companies.

• Mimetic pressures on the top leaders commitment is higher.

• The role of coercive pressures is insignificant on top leaders commitment.

Abstract

The business intelligence (BI) has been often touted as a game-changer especially during the pandemic crisis. Although most managers are familiar with BI and agree that, it should be operationalized across their organizations. The BI is not well assimilated throughout adopting organizations. Rooted in institutional and upper echelon theories, this study proposes a theoretical model aimed toward explaining BI assimilation. We surveyed 174 respondents occupying leadership positions from174 auto-components manufacturing firms in India to gather data. The findings suggest that normative and mimetic (but not coercive) factors significantly influence top leader’s commitment to the BI initiatives. We found that the commitment of the top leaders influences the assimilation of BI via acceptance and routinization. Our study is an attempt to address the previous research calls related to BI assimilation. The findings of the study inform the information management scholars via theory-based research on phenomena related to post-adoption BI diffusion during a pandemic crisis. Practitioners can utilize the results of our study to design their policies that help assimilate BI such that forecasted benefits can be fully realized during an uncertain time.

Introduction

“Necessity has been the mother of invention in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, triggering many an innovation, often without the luxury of time to test these makeshift solutions to pressing problems. But there is much to be learned from times of crisis for times of plenty” (Harris, Bhatti, Buckley, & Sharma, 2020, p. 814)

The pandemic due to COVID-19 has seriously affected the small and medium enterprises (Dwivedi et al., 2020; Ivanov & Dolgui, 2020; Papadopoulos, Baltas, & Balta, 2020; Remko, 2020). Many organisations have significantly exploited the business intelligence (BI) capability to stay afloat in this unprecedented time (Kummitha, 2020; Queiroz, Tallon, Sharma, & Coltman, 2018; Ranjan & Foropon, 2021). It is well understood that BI plays an important role in improving business performance (Dwivedi et al., 2021; Koh & Gunasekaran, 2006; Pramanik, Mondal, & Haldar, 2020). In a recent report published by Sisence (The State of BI and Business Analytics Report, 2020) has highlighted significant rise in the use of BI and analytics in response to COVID-19 crisis (Queiroz, Ivanov, Dolgui, & Wamba, 2020). Although there are numerous BI success stories reported in the academic literature (Olszak, 2016), there remain many skeptics who often criticize the role and impact of BI (see, Božič & Dimovski, 2019) during pandemic crisis (Lee & Trimi, 2020). Although, the failure stories of the BI has gathered significant attention from the academic community (Tian et al., 2015) and in many instances, predicted benefits of BI are not realized (Audzeyeva & Hudson, 2016). Furthermore, BI is often inconsistently operationalized across different contexts (see, Chen & Lin, 2020) and is often implemented based on prescriptive and not participative assumptions. Despite of rich body of literature on BI, the existing literature has largely remained silent on how BI is assimilated across the organisation (Elbashir, Collier, & Davern, 2008; Fosso Wamba & Queiroz, 2020).

While there is a rich body of literature on factors influencing the success of BI implementation (Ramakrishnan, Jones, & Sidorova, 2012; Wang, 2014; López-Robles et al., 2019), studies aimed toward explaining BI assimilation are limited (Ahmad & Hossain, 2018; Shao, 2019). The previous studies have noted that the adoption and implementation, are often considered as the foundation of the diffusion of any technological innovation. In any organization (Dubey et al., 2018; Hazen, Overstreet, & Cegielski, 2012), and the full benefits may not be well realized by the organization until and unless the technological innovation is fully assimilated (Dubey et al., 2018; Dwivedi, Rana, Jeyaraj, Clement, & Williams, 2019; Hazen et al., 2012; Williams, Dwivedi, Lal, & Schwarz, 2009). Based on Purvis, Sambamurthy, and Zmud (2001) and Hazen et al. (2012) definitions, we define BI assimilation as the extent to which BI philosophy diffuses across organizational processes and activities. Hence, the key objective of BI post-implementation activities is to assimilate the philosophy and practices across business routines such that organization achieve maximum benefits of BI implementation (Nam, Lee, & Lee, 2019). Moreover, how organization assimilate during pandemic crisis is not well understood. The purpose of this study is to investigate the means through which BI is assimilated throughout organizations during pandemic crisis. To address our research objective, we posit two guiding research questions as:

RQ1: What are the antecedents of BI assimilation?

RQ2: How can firms assimilate BI across their organizations during pandemic crisis?

Kar and Dwivedi (2020) argued in favour of building theory that may help organization to understand how the use of big data analytics and business intelligence capability may enhance performance during uncertain environment. Drawing on institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) and upper echelon theory (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), we develop a theoretical model to explain how the external institutional forces and the top leader’s commitment influence BI assimilation within an organization. Extending the findings of Liang, Saraf, Hu, and Xue (2007) and Nam et al. (2019), we submit that top leader’s commitment plays a pivotal role in channelizing the external institutional pressures into BI assimilation. Furthermore, we extend the work of Wang (2014) and Ain, Vaia, DeLone, and Waheed (2019) by studying assimilation instead of adoption or implementation. Hazen et al. (2012) have attempted to explain the journey from adoption to assimilation using two intermediary stages, namely acceptance and routinization.

Following previous arguments we assume the role of external pressures (Liang et al., 2007) and top leader’s (internal human agents) play significant roles in the acceptance, routinization and assimilation of BI, we submit that the role of contextual assimilation factors remains largely unexplored. We therefore propose a BI assimilation framework for pandemic crisis, grounded in organizational theories, that offers two unique contributions to the literature (Pan & Zhang, 2020). Firstly, we examine BI assimilation using two organizational theories (i.e. institutional theory and upper echelon theory). Secondly, we investigate to what extent top leader’s commitment mediates the relationship between institutional pressures and BI acceptance. This research thus provides a new perspective on BI assimilation.

The remainder of the article is organized as follows. In the next section, we discuss the theoretical framework and research hypotheses. Second section focuses on the development of our research model and hypotheses. Third section focuses on the research method. In this section, we discuss our questionnaire development, sampling design and data collection strategy. In the fourth section, we present our data analysis and results. In the fifth section, we present our discussion section based on our research findings. In this section, we have further discussed our contributions to the theory. In the same section, we further discuss our findings in context to the practice. We further outlined our limitations of our study and further noted future research directions. Finally, we concluded our study.