Business Analytics and Firm Performance: A Literature Review.

Technological advancements and increasingly available intra- and extra-organizational data have attracted firms to invest in business analytics. Despite the growing number of firms that have invested in business analytics, only some of them have been able to turn their investments into tangible business benefits. This has raised questions among researchers and practitioners about the causal ambiguity between business analytics adoption and firm performance outcomes. Consequently, academic research community has recently launched an endeavor to produce empirical evidence on the relationship between business analytics and firm performance, considering different complementary resources, capabilities, and mechanisms that could better explain what firms need to gain business benefits from business analytics (e.g., Brynjolfsson and McElheran, 2016; Gupta and George, 2016). The purpose of this study is to improve the current understanding on the relationship between business analytics and firm performance. This is done by reviewing 47 peerreviewed studies that have empirically studied the phenomenon. Academic literature that examines how firms could benefit from data and analytics has separated into several parallel sub-streams, including business analytics, data analytics, big data analytics, and business intelligence and analytics. In this study, an umbrella term business analytics is used to cover all of them. Thus, another objective of this study is to merge the research output of different sub-streams related to business analytics and firm performance. This establishes a more comprehensive view of the literature landscape. This study finds that firms can translate business analytics into business benefits by ensuring that they simultaneously possess different complementary resources and capabilities, that are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate. Also, business analytics literature has matured into a stage where it is not focusing solely on data and analytics technology, but also on talent (employees and management) and organization (culture) aspects, which together provide a fertile ground for the firm's business analytics capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]