Business Analytics

Analysis of an Emerging Concept

Marcos Paulo Valadares de Oliveira

, Claudia Xavier Cavalcanti

and Marcelo Bronzo Ladeira

Departamento de Administração, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Campus Goiabeiras, Vitória, ES, Brazil

Departamento de Administração, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, FACE, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil

Keywords: Business Analytics, Analytics Orientation, Decision Making.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a scientometric research on Business Analytics concept

aiming to analyze the literature in a quantitative and descriptive way. In order to develop this research, it

was conducted a literature review considering all papers that had the term “Business Analytics” in the title

and which were published from 2002 to 2012. The findings presented in this paper are based on 155 papers

found, being 137 identified as publications in IT and business magazines and just a few number of articles a

total of 23 articles were published in academic journals. The findings corroborate that BA is becoming very

well known among a large number of companies worldwide, being applied in order to improve business

process performance. Since BA concept is in an embryonic state, more researches should be conducted in

order to build a more robust literature under the realm of business administration considering the scarcity of

empirical articles in reputable academic journals.

1 INTRODUCTION

The decision-making processes have historically

been subject of several studies, both within and

outside the business administration field. Several

authors have contributed significantly to enrich the

analysis of this issue. An important landmark on this

field was provided by Simon (Simon, 1947; 1955;

1956), who offered a remarkable contribution

discussing about the limits of rationality in decision

making.

Companies are always looking for more

intelligent solutions for their businesses in order to

improve their processes and achieve superior results.

According to (Davenport and Harris, 2007), when

companies adopt business analytics they are taking

advantage of solutions to their business problems, by

transforming data into knowledge for decision

making.

The process of decision making in organizations

requires that managers have not only advanced

knowledge about the conditions of both internal and

external environment, but also the capability to

evaluate the results of their decisions and their

consequences for the company.

According to (Isik et al., 2011), in response to a

growing amount of data to be analyzed in companies

and due to increasing pressure to respond better and

faster to customers, companies have turned to the

adoption of Business Intelligence (BI) as means to

improve organizational decision making. For (Zeng

et al., 2012), BI is the process of collecting correct

information in the right format at the right time for

delivery of the results for decision making in order

to have a positive impact on business operations,

tactics and strategies in companies.

In this context, "Business Analytics" (BA)

concept emerged as an approach that takes

advantage of a set of BI tools for business enabling

managers to obtain real-time access to predictive

information. According to (Varga and Vukovi,

2007), BA enables organizations to go beyond

traditional BI by providing an integrated system, a

corporate vision of information and a higher level of

knowledge about forecasting and optimization of

processes.

According to Varshney and Mojsilovic (2011),

BA concept represents a framework that

encompasses many solutions such as demand

forecasting, capacity planning of resources,

manpower planning, optimization and modeling of

the sales force, forecasting revenue, better customer

understanding and products, among other solutions.

However, this great interest in Business

547

Valadares de Oliveira M., Xavier Cavalcanti C. and Bronzo Ladeira M. (2013).

Business Analytics - Analysis of an Emerging Concept.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval and the International Conference on Knowledge

Management and Information Sharing, pages 547-551

DOI: 10.5220/0004650905470551

 SCITEPRESS

Analytics among worldwide companies is still at the

beginning in the academic world, so due to these

reasons, this paper aim to provide a diagnosis of

how this matter is being treated in the academic

environment.

The scientometric (Raan, 1997) was applied

taking into account some indicators related to a

general bibliometric research, including the number

of papers per year, the journals where such

publications occurred, the nationality of the main

authors, the number of participants per article, the

impact factors and a citation analysis.

In addition, an analysis was done in the

perspective of the content of the selected papers,

regarding the context of the papers (Business or

Technology environment), the academic or non-

academic orientation of the publication (Business,

IT), and the relationship of BA with other constructs

(e.g. decision-making process, strategy, BI, supply

chain, planning and others) as well as the

methodology applied in each empirical work (e.g.

case studies, survey, conceptual articles, multiple

methods).

2 PUBLICATIONS ABOUT

BUSINESS ANALYTICS

There are no doubts that publications on BA topics

have become more common in both management

and IT magazines. The most important moment of

BA literature occurred when it acquired more

visibility through the publication of Davenport’s

paper “Competing on Analytics” in the Harvard

Business Review. Later on in a book, (Davenport

and Harris, 2007) additionally described BA as the

extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative

analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and

fact-based management to drive decisions and

actions.

(Davenport and Harris, 2007) proposed that

companies must consider two distinct domains

regarding BA: i) Internal Analytics: Financial,

Manufacturing, Research & development, Human

Resources; and ii) External Analytics: Customer and

Supplier. In order to approach such domains,

companies must “get the data in shape” preparing

large amounts of high-quality data to build

prosperous analytical environments. Analytical

competition requires a clear business strategy in

which executives should consider what key

processes and strategic initiatives would be

advanced based on the right analytics.

Besides Davenport’s publications, there are some

relevant papers that should be highlighted. (Oliveira

et al., 2012), in the paper Business analytics in

supply chains – The contingent effect of business

process maturity, analyzes the effect of the use of

business analytics on supply chain performance,

investigating the changing information processing

needs at different supply chain process maturity

levels.

Another relevant publication is The impact of

business analytics on supply chain performance by

(Trkman et al., 2010) that analyze the relationship

between analytical capabilities in the plan, source,

make and deliver area of supply chains and their

impact on organizational performance, taking

information system support and business process

orientation as moderators. The authors conclude that

the moderation effect of information systems

support is stronger than the effect of business

process orientation, highlighting the importance of a

company's use of its databases, explicative and

predictive models and fact-based management to

drive its decisions.

Another relevant paper that provides a new

perspective of BA is The Talent and analytics: new

approaches, higher ROI (Jeanne et al., 2011). In this

paper, authors correlate BA to Human Resources

processes and propose one ladder of analytical HR

applications. In this sense, some approaches have

more impact than others, and can be envisioned as a

ladder of analytical sophistication.

Additionally, the paper Integrating business

analytics into strategic planning (Klatt et al., 2011)

provided a relevant contribution by showing that the

effective use of business analytics is achieved by

combining three different application perspectives: i)

the IT Based applications; ii) the management

accounting applications; and iii) the analytical

methods applications.

More recently, it can also be cited a paper

developed by (Loukis et al., 2012) entitled

Transforming e-services evaluation data into

business analytics using value models Transforming

e-services evaluation data into business analytics

using value models. In this paper the authors

emphasize how the websites have been evaluating

large amounts of data nowadays, suggesting that

transforming these data into useful business

analytics requires a better understanding of the

strengths and weaknesses of the e-service, providing

guidance for its improvement and optimization. The

authors propose and validate a methodology for

transforming user evaluation data into useful

business analytics and define value model for e-

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services.

Despite of the scarcity of papers published in

ranked management journals about BA, they

collaborate for building the concept, presenting BA

as an emerging subject both for practitioners and

academicals.

3 BIBLIOMETRIC RESEARCH

Even though it was possible to locate only 23

published scientific articles in the period 2002-2012,

it is important to highlight a quite remarkable

evolution starting in 2006. As can be seen in Figure

1, after a peak in 2008, there is an increasing number

of publications on the topic year by year since 2009,

with other peaks in 2011 and 2012.

Figure 1: Evolution of BA publications.

It is important to point out that the majority of

the articles in BA have appeared in unranked

journals. Empirical research in BA has reached top-

class journals only to a moderate extent so far. Out

of 23 papers found, only 5 papers were published in

journals listed at Journal of Citation Reports. In this

sense, it suggests that an increase of articles in

ranked journals can be expected with growing

popularity and proceeding maturity of the research

field in the future.

There is a considerable amount of magazines that

have already published BA reports. It was possible

to find 137 publications in IT and Business

specialized magazines in the last 10 years (e.g.

eWeek, InformationWeek, Computer World, and so

on.).

Such evidences position Business Analytics as an

emerging field that it is attracting much interest from

practitioners’ community but still embryonic as an

academic research subject. In this sense, it can

depicted from this that Business Analytics is a

excellent opportunity as a research field for

academicals since practitioners are demanding more

info and knowledge about it.

The prevalence of American authors in BA

publications is quite notable. Considering the

authorship of the scientifically grounded papers,

46% of researchers are from universities in United

States. It is relevant also to point out that researchers

from different countries (India 17%, Singapore 7%,

Germany 6%, Greece 6%, Israel 6%, Croatia 4%,

Brazil 2%, Slovenia 2%, Serbia 2% and Switzerland

2%) have been publishing also, even though in a

lower percentage.

Table 1 summarizes the research publications

descriptive data considering 3 perspectives: Meta

perspective, Content-based perspective and

methodological perspective (Houy et al., 2010).

Table 1: Papers classified by research perspectives.

From the meta-perspective, once there are just a

few BA empirical papers, the values of the

indicators are low in general, especially regarding

contributions per journal and per year. The average

of 2.3 authors per article is in accordance to most

part of articles published in academic journals.

From the methodological perspective, as BA

researches are fairly new in the academic

environment, most publications are theoretical

(43.48%) or based on case studies (34.78%). Survey

methodologies are represented by 21.74% but almost

all of the Surveys were published in ranked journals.

The use of case study for BA research is explained

by (Trkman, 2010) as a way of tackling areas that

are still in the understanding, discovery and

description stage, being strongly recommended as a

research strategy in an emerging area.

From the content-based perspective, empirical

BA approaches are more often applied in the

Business context and a mixed Business/IT

orientation context. Nevertheless, the interest in BA

and the practical application in the administration

context have increased in recent years, even though

BA is well known in the IT context. The chart below

shows the issues that were related to BA in the 23

Meta‐perspective

ContributionsperyearNumber 2,1

Contributionsperjournal 1,0

Contributionspercountry/region 2,2

Contributionsperresearcher 0,4

Participatingauthorsperarticle 2,3

Content‐basedperspectiveContext Nr. %

Technologyoriented 6 27%

Businessoriented 9 41%

Technology/Businessoriented 9 41%

MethodicalperspectiveResearchmethod Nr. %

Survey 5 23%

Theoretic 11 50%

Casestudy 836%

Actionresearch 0 0%

Multimethod 0 0%

BusinessAnalytics-AnalysisofanEmergingConcept

549

academic articles. The occurrences were distributed

in Supply Chain (13%), IT (13%) and Management

Performance (21%). Such distribution shows that

BA subject is being embraced for different

knowledge areas in a multidisciplinary context.

Figure 2: BA publications by subject.

This research identified that most part of the

authors that published BA articles have a common

vision that Business Analytics focuses on the

development of new insights for improving business

performance and may be used as input for human

decisions or may drive automated decisions.

4 FINAL REMARKS

The presented article has introduced business

process empirical research as an emerging field in

BA. By evaluating a reference framework to support

a comprehensive analysis of BA articles and

identifying interesting trends in BA research from a

meta-perspective, a content-based and a

methodological perspective (Houy et al., 2010), the

results open rich possibilities of scientific research in

the area.

In fact, BA is becoming an important issue

among competitive companies. In other side, in

regards to academic issues, it has a long and fertile

way ahead. This demand can be identified when we

look to the amount of publications in non scientific

magazines showing how attractive BA is for

practitioners. In order to achieve a relevant position

in the academic environment, researchers from all

over the world should be encouraged to develop new

scientific researches regarding BA.

If more academic articles in BA are required, it

means that it will be highly relevant for research as

well as for practice in organizations. It can provide

important information for companies regarding how

to apply existing methods, process models, best

practices as well as BA tools in an effective and

efficient way.

This paper noticed that it is extremely necessary

to have more accuracy in regards to the procedure

and methodology employed in BA scientific

researches. Concerning the quality of publications, it

was found that some problems like lack of

methodological rigor, especially for the low

percentage of papers that state clearly the

methodology applied in the research. This fact is

confirmed by the low percentage of papers in ranked

journals. Even though some papers should be

improved, there are some relevant ones that should

be highlighted and that really promoted relevant

contributions to the field.

The analysis of the 23 scientific articles

published in the period between 2002-2012

presented an overview of the prevailing research

methodologies, indicating the notable “few” but

growing number of articles published in the area of

Business Analytics. It is important to point out that

majority of these papers are related to the

management area. However, there is a great amount

of no academic articles (137) which were published

in specialized IT magazines.

The predominant number of American

researches (46%) in comparison to other countries,

indicates that USA dominates the “BA

environment”, even though other countries have

been growing in this field (e.g. Brazil, India,

Germany, Singapore, Greece, Israel). In regards to

research methodologies, the results present the

preference for descriptive and theoretic research

(50%) followed by case studies (36%) and survey

research (23%).

In fact, new researches should be developed

about Business Analytics, in order to make this

emerging field more explored and mature. It would

be expected that those prominent qualitative and

theoretical studies could serve as a basis on which

further quantitative and conclusive works can be

developed, testing hypothesis and validating models.

A more balanced research agenda, in this case, will

be of much value, advancing our knowledge and

understanding of such relevant topic on operations

and business management theories and practices.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors would like to thank FAPES and CNPq for

support.

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