From analytics investments to revenue generation : a three-stage process to value creation with business analytics.

Business analytics is currently changing the business landscape in terms of competition, innovation, and relevance. While it is said that the combination of big data and advanced analytics technologies hold vast potential for boosting innovation, competition, and productivity for organizations across diverse industries, scholarly research on how they lead to competitive advantage and business value are scarce. This study examines how organizations can create value from their analytics investments. This study is based on a 5 – year single case study with multiple projects of a large U.S.- based distribution firm that partnered with a technology provider to implement analytics to improve its profit margins. Utilizing the theory of affordance and metaphor of imbrication as a synthesizing device, a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews, field notes from observation meetings, and project documents indicate that organizations may go through three stages to create value from their analytics investments. This research offers two primary contributions. First, the use of the affordance theory and imbrication metaphor provides a holistic understanding of the factors that play an essential role in the value-creation process with business analytics. Second, this study offers a three-stage process model that provides insights into the recursive inter-relationship of socio-technical entities in the organizational environment that impact the extent to which analytics affordances can be actualized.