A Framework of Value Creation from Business Intelligence and Analytics in Competitive Sports

Over the last 10 years, Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) has become a topic of great interest for Information Systems (IS) researchers and practitioners. BI&A initiatives have generated benefits in several organizations across various industries including banking, insurance, entertainment, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, and more. A relatively new yet insightful domain of application for BI&A is competitive sports, where elite sports organizations, teams and athletes attempt to leverage the use of available data and technology to enhance their performance at many levels. While the use of BI&A tools in competitive sports have recently enjoyed sparks of popularity, academic research remains at a very early stage. In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework of value creation from BI&A use in competitive sports. Based on previous work on the business value of IT and IT-enabled competitive advantage, the framework underlines the multi-level nature of value creation for BI&A in competitive sports, and identifies a set of contextual contingencies that will affect the creation of value at each level of analysis. Finally, because research in BI&A use in competitive sports is still emerging, we identify a set of avenues for future research that, in combination with our proposed framework, will stimulate future studies in sports analytics.