Improving Decision Quality for Business Users Based on Cloud-based Self-Service Business Intelligence Tools

Abstract

The ever-growing volume of data promotes data-driven decision-making in more cases and more areas than before. The development of user-friendly self-service BI (SSBI) tools enable business users to autonomously execute tasks in the area of Business Intelligence (BI), statistical analysis, or data science. Cloud computing offers the opportunity to provide SSBI as services as well. This paper focusses on cloud-based SSBI tools and their support for data-driven decision-making by business users. This paper aims to identify the influence of a deeper understanding of business informatics on (a) the handling of the cloud-based SSBI tools and (b) the data-driven decision making performance. An experimental setting was used to collect empirical data. Two groups with equal knowledge in business administration, but different backgrounds in business informatics have been defined. Based on different backgrounds in business informatics, the results show no significant difference in handling the cloud-based SSBI tool but reveal significant differences in decision-making performance.