Weighting the challenges to the effectiveness of business intelligence systems in organisations: an empirical study of government organisations in Saudi Arabia

This paper represents an attempt to investigate and weight the challenges to the effectiveness of BI systems in organisations. A conceptual framework was first developed based on four prime themes: the BI capability, decision, technological, and organisational contexts. The conceptual framework was then examined by leveraging the Delphi method with BI experts from two case government organisations located in Saudi Arabia. The analysis of the empirical data collected suggested some modifications to the challenges. Thereafter, the BI experts weighted the challenges by means of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. The results show that the organisational compatibility and IT, BI system, and data collection capabilities were ranked as the greatest challenges. Decisional uncertainty and organisational culture were shown to be the lowest ranked challenges. The unique theoretical contribution made by this research is an AHP research framework of the challenges to the effectiveness of BI systems in organisations.