Business Analytics and Firm Performance: A Literature Review

Abstract

Technological advancements and increasingly available intra- and extra-organizational data have attracted firms to invest in business analytics. Despite the growing number of firms that have invested in business analytics, only some of them have been able to turn their investments into tangible business benefits. This has raised questions among researchers and practitioners about the causal ambiguity between business analytics adoption and firm performance outcomes. Consequently, academic research community has recently launched an endeavor to produce empirical evidence on the relationship between business analytics and firm performance, considering different complementary resources, capabilities, and mechanisms that could better explain what firms need to gain business benefits from business analytics (e.g., Brynjolfsson and McElheran, 2016; Gupta and George, 2016).