Enterprise Systems, ICT Capabilities and Business Analytics Adoption – An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Business Analytics (BA) has attracted great interest among firms of most sectors worldwide, as it enables a more advanced and valuable exploitation of firms’ data assets, beyond operations, for the supporting of decision-making. However, though numerous firms take some first steps in this area, most of them make limited use of BA in some of their activities, and cannot advance to a more extensive adoption of BA throughout their activities, so they do not exploit the full potential of it. For this reason, some first research has been conducted on BA adoption and factors affecting it, however more research is required on this topic. Our study makes a contribution to this research stream, by investigating empirically the effect of the extent of enterprise systems (such as ERP, CRM and SCM ones) adoption, as well as the degree of development of firm’s ICT capabilities, distinguishing between technological and management ones, on the extent of BA adoption. It has been based on the Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE) framework. We have used data collected from 363 Greek firms from both manufacturing and services sectors through a questionnaire, from which ordinal regression models are estimated. It has been concluded that both the adoption of enterprise systems, as well as the development of firm’s ICT capabilities, and especially the ICT management capabilities, affect positively the extent of BA adoption.