The Impact of Business Intelligence on Decision-Making in Public Organisations

This study investigates how business intelligence (BI) affects decision-making processes and the basis for decisions. Therefore, the inquiry includes literature from the field of BI and interviews with three Swedish agencies. It concentrates specifically on three fundamentals of BI-driven decision-making: data quality, data analysis and the human factor. The results emphasise BI’s impact on decision-making and interrelated processes. Although BI does not reduce the volume of decisions, it enables a decision-maker or organisation to control and monitor the decision basis, which suggests that decision quality increases if the decision concerns issues that rest on statistics and facts. Based on theoretical and empirical findings, this paper contributes to an increased understanding of the impact of BI on decision-making at Swedish agencies.