Title: How business intelligence works when analytics meet guanxi

Authors: Bo Han; Shih Yung Chou

Addresses: Department of Business Administration & MIS, College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Texas A&M University – Commerce, 2600 South Neal Street, Commerce, Texas, 75428, USA ' Department of Management, College of Business and Engineering, University of Texas of the Permian Basin, 4901 E. University, Odessa, Texas, 79762, USA

Abstract: Mainland China is an emerging market for business intelligence (BI). However, Chinese senior manager's ingrained guanxi-based decision making practices are considered the largest obstacle of the BI system diffusion to local enterprises. In the current research, we perform a comparison between business intelligence-based decision making philosophies (i.e., business analytics) and guanxi-based decision making philosophies in four dimensions: 1) the key player dimension; 2) the business practice dimension; 3) the time orientation dimension; 4) the performance measurement dimension. After the comparative study, we offer several propositions to practitioners in order to find the possibilities of introducing business analytics to Chinese enterprises that have been strongly influenced by guanxi networks.

Keywords: business information systems; business intelligence; business analytics; guanxi networks; social commerce; comparative study; China; decision making; time orientation; performance measurement.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2014.065563

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2014 Vol.17 No.4, pp.440 - 452

Published online: 31 Oct 2014 *

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