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In today’s competitive landscape, BA is envisioned as a game changer capable of revolutionizing the way businesses operate in many industries (Lee, 2017). The insights gained through BA may enable businesses to outperform their competitors and stay ahead of the curve. Hence, decision makers and executives see data and analytics as a transforming force in business. Many organizations are therefore implementing BA technologies to support reporting and decision-making (Rickhardsson & Yigitbasioglu, 2018). Since BA can be thought of as an enabler for decision-making and problem solving (Delen and Ram, 2018), having BA capabilities has already become an important goal for organizations. By translating available data into valuable information, decision makers can justify and revise their decisions based on up-to-date information and generate forward-looking projections.
While there is no agreed upon definition of BA, it may be defined as “the art and science of discovering insight by using mathematical, statistical, machine learning, and network science methods along with a variety of data and expert knowledge to support better and faster decision-making” (Delen and Ram, 2018). BA can change the dynamics of how businesses operate. As pointed out by (Davenport & Dyche, 2013), it can bring about dramatic cost reductions, substantial improvements in the time required to perform a computing task, or new product and service offerings. Sharma et al., (2014) argue that BA improves organizational performance through enabling superior decision-making processes. Similarly, as suggested by (Evans, 2012), various research studies have discovered strong relationships between a company’s performance in terms of profitability, revenue, and shareholder return, and its use of analytics. Therefore, BA is seen as indispensable to stay competitive (Appelbaum et al., 2017)