Adoption of business analytics and impact on performance: a qualitative study in retail

Abstract

This paper describes a qualitative study aimed at understanding issues faced by retail firms when they start a project of implementing Business Analytics (BA) and understanding the impact of BA implementation on business performance. Our study is informed by prior literature and the theoretical perspectives of the Technology-Organisation-Environment (TOE) framework but is not constrained by this theory. Using case studies of nine retailers in the UK, we have found support for the link between TOE elements and adoption. In addition, we have identified more interesting involvement of additional factors in ensuring how firms could maximise benefit derived from BA and traditional TOE factors that potentially could have additional impacts different from the ones. For example, there appears a link between adoption of BA and business performance (including performance in terms of environmental sustainability), and this link is moderated by the level of BA adoption, IT integration and trust.

Overcoming Barriers in Supply Chain Analytics—Investigating Measures in LSCM Organizations

“…In addition, some labor requirements for analytics present a challenge for LSCM organizations in themselves. The literature emphasizes a lack of employees in LSCM organizations to handle and understand data, analytics software, and IT systems, as well as being able to interpret the analytics results [38]. However, Kache and Seuring [13] report that LSCM managers lack an understanding of what skills the required employees need to possess, leading to problems in recruiting these employees.…”

“…Furthermore, scholars highlight the problem of attribution of any performance increase to the investment in analytics. They present issues of quantifying benefits, attributing benefits to analytics or process changes, and time lags between implementation and identifiable performance increase (ramp-up) [36,38,40]. In this regard, scholars have referenced the "IT productivity paradox," as discussed by Brynjolfsson [41], which presents the paradoxical situation of researchers not being able to measure a productivity increase from IT while organizations were increasingly investing in it (e.g., because performance increase is not measurable with their usual performance measurement or because of time lags).…”

“…However, the issue of integrating systems in a diverse and incompatible IT landscape impedes the integration of data sources. LSCM managers reported a lack of integration of existing systems to scholars due to evolved (rather than designed) environments with specialized systems for the various business units or due to legacy systems not intended for data exchange [12][13][14]38]. Scholars have emphasized that the issue is particularly present when supply chain partners with unaligned systems (fragmented systems with varying maturity) are expected to combine data sources [13].…”

“…Moreover, access does not equal ownership. Data ownership and the associated rights to data can be missing or unclear [14,38].…”

“…Scholars report issue with the mindset of employees regarding analytics solutions. The employees may not want to use new, analytics-based systems, do not show openness toward them, and are not eager to change their culture [9,12,38]. Richey et al [14] specifically discuss how employees in LSCM value relationships and trust-based business generation, which they do not want to sacrifice for data driven solutions.…”