Designing a report recommendation assistant: A first design cycle

Abstract

Employees often supplement their organization’s Business Intelligence (BI) system with individually tinkered reports. Unfortunately, these supplements bear numerous threats such as limited report reuse across all users of the BI system. Therefore, we established a design science research (DSR) project by exploring impediments of existing BI systems, building metarequirements and suggesting design principles. In particular, we propose a Report Recommendation Assistant (RRA) for improving reuse of reports across potential users. In this paper, we present our DSR project and focus on the first evaluation cycle. Our results indicate that the RRA has a positive impact on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the BI system. Furthermore, we find that these effects are negatively moderated by user’s expertise in using the BI system and are not biased by the underlying BI system. Finally, we leverage results from BI expert interviews and existing literature to refine the proposed RRA.