THE IMPACT OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ON STRATEGIC DECISION MAKING

Abstract

Business intelligence is an important issue to collect and bring the data together that decision making is depended on. Managers in today’s organizations are still to know how to apply Business Intelligence (BI) in Strategic Decision Making. The main aim of this study is to explore the impact of business intelligence on strategic decision making. Business intelligence is not only a tool or a product or a system, it's described as a new approach in the organizational architecture that is based on the speed of analyzing information to make the accurate strategic decision in a less time with high quality. Strategic decision making could be defined as gradual and interdependent, which is formed by a variety of impacts contextual to the past events arising in present-day conditions and finally the future views. A descriptive method was applied to carry out this research with primary and secondary data collected. Using questionnaires applied at four communication companies in Iraq, experienced top level managers and those in middle management are the focus of this research. SPSS software was used to analyze the results. Results show that business intelligence has a great impact on strategic decision making and improved the efficiency and effectiveness of strategic decision making. The relation of business intelligence parts and decision making were positive which means that business intelligence tools, BIS infrastructure flexibility and BI use could be able to improve the efficiency of strategic decision making. Managers still have to use more managerial tools for their decisions to be strongly affected by business intelligence. This explains why managers have been advised in many areas on how to manage their companies by keeping in mind that business intelligence has an impact on strategic decision making.