Business Intelligence & Analytics Cost Accounting: A Survey on the Perceptions of Stakeholders

As data driven decision-making using business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) becomes standard in companies, the importance of mitigating the accompanying growth in costs increases. Research shows that increasing transparency to the granularity of individual BI&A artefacts such as reports or analytic applications is a necessary means, but in practice the introduction of said systems is cumbersome and adoption is slow. We address the status quo of BI&A cost accounting for three types of stakeholders: users, developers and managers. The results show in which areas of application a strong need for action exists and we identify major challenges for further research are ahead. Our findings indicate for example that managers at the same time regard cost accounting for BI&A with a higher potential benefit while they also believe they have already established a higher degree of implementation in their enterprises compared to the other stakeholder types. We conclude that BI&A professionals have to consider these different perceptions to run a successful department and gain traction for BI&A cost accounting.