Using Business Intelligence to support IT Strategic Management

The latest financial crisis revealed not only a need for business efficiency but more than ever a need for effectiveness. Wrong or poor decisions could easily threaten a company’s survival in this fragile environment. As a strategic partner, the IT organization has an obligation to seek for necessary changes, reorganize its strategies and plans to provide the organization with competitive advantage and ultimately survive the crises without big losses. This chain of events drives stakeholders to require from the IT managers greater transparency about development and operation costs, plans and decisions. Nevertheless, it seems the IT organizations were not prepared for these demands either because they do not have the required information or due to the lack of processes and tools to make informed decisions. The purpose of this project is to understand and support the decision-making processes in the IT development organization of Danske Bank (Shared Service Center; SSC) by integrating business intelligence from different domains. My interest lies first in investigating the relationship between business intelligence (BI) and organizational decisions and second how business intelligence can be applied or used to support strategic management and decision making processes in an IT development organization. Specifically, I seek to develop a BI framework or a prescriptive theory of BI that will help IT managers make better, informed decisions. A qualitative approach is selected to investigate the issue and a case study fits best the nature of the problem.

Primary supervisor: Karlheinz Kautz (CBS/INF)

Discussant for the 1. Seminar: Lene Pries-Heje (CBS/INF)

According to the new rules and regulations PhD students at CBS have to hold a 1. seminar concerning their PhD project within the first six months of their studies. The purpose of the seminar is twofold: (1) it gives the student the opportunity to publically present the PhD work (2) it provides the student with feedback on the work beyond the primary supervisor. The ‘successful’ performance of the seminar will be approved by the student’s primary supervisor and the local PhD co-ordinator.

The format of the seminar is as follows:

The student’s supervisor acts as the facilitator for the meeting.

1 – The student will present her/his project based on a 20 to 25 pages document including the project plan, the research question, any research design, and preliminary results (e.g. results from a literature review which identified a research gap, a research model, etc.). This part takes up to max. 30 minutes!

2 – An assigned discussant who has had the opportunity to read the seminar document provides about 25 minutes of feedback based on the document and the student’s presentation.

3 – The public audience has afterwards the opportunity to provide feedback based on the student’s presentation for about 35 minutes.

Karl Kautz

PhD co-ordinator CBS/INF