Introduction

Organizations are exposed to a rapidly changing business environment with never ending challenges. Investments in information technology (IT) have been one common approach to support organizations. Business Intelligence (BI), an off-spring from IT, is a system that assists many organizations in taking more accurate and timely decisions, improving process monitoring and providing better support for decision making. Recently organizations have started to realize the value of investing in BI, by discovering its analytical methods and capabilities to create business value.

Problem

Investments in BI have increased substantially over the past years and one reason for this might be due to vendors praise about BI’s ability to deliver business value. Significantly increased business value, better decision making, and high returns on investments are only a few benefits that have been claimed for. When considering the fact that it is very difficult to measure any direct benefits from IT investments in general, and BI as a consequence, an interest for analyzing the arguments used for selling BI emerged.

Purpose

The purpose of this thesis is to identify what arguments vendors and suppliers use when selling BI solutions, and explore their value by analyzing them through the use of existing theories from literature.

Method

A qualitative approach has been adopted, where unstructured interviews with BI vendors and suppliers were conducted. An inductive approach has been applied to gather arguments and then shifted to a deductive, in order to finalize the study and analyze arguments with appropriate theory. The research has been performed from without the Swedish market with well-known organizations.

Conclusions

A single version of the truth, control, and time savings are credible arguments for investing in BI. Furthermore, cost savings and improved analytical capabilities are fairly credible, whereas increased efficiency has least credibility when analyzed against theories. In general, we believe that the ability to gain from these positive effects from BI, organizations have to take an active role in realizing these.