Examining the Impact of Business Intelligence Systems on Business Process Performance in the Public Sector: working paper

Amidst widespread reforms initiated under new public management programs, public sector organizations have placed a high priority on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their processes and on enhancing the delivery of information to clients/citizens. Recent public sector research on IT implementation and e-government has focused primarily on the use of the Internet and web resources to improve access to the wealth of data captured and stored by public sector organizations. This study focuses on the adoption of Business Intelligence systems to facilitate the internal use of this wealth of data as a means for improving business process performance. Data are collected via a survey with responses from 160 individuals representing 121 public sector organizations in Australia. All organizations are users of the same BI vendors software. We examine the underlying institutional factors that facilitate the leveraging of BI systems to enhance business process performance. Our findings indicate a greater importance of social factors in comparison to technical factors in relation to business process performance. In particular, we find top management team support is critical to the level of knowledge importation links, shared knowledge between IT and line managers, and the sophistication of the IT infrastructure. However, the resulting levels of knowledge importation links and shared knowledge are the critical factors that ultimately drive business process performance. The results provide important insights to understanding the dynamics in public sector organizations that lead to effective implementation and leveraging of advanced IT systems for internal process improvement.