Analytics in a Decision Service Context

Abstract: Organizations struggle to rapidly respond to competitive and changing business environments and therefore implement smarter Information Systems that incorporate automated decision services. An imminent role for complementing automated decision making are analytics, as it can evaluate past performances to provide insights on potential future decision making endeavors. While the consensus on how analytics support decision making is considerable, how analytics are utilized and the values it provide to an automated decision services is limitedly explored. Therefore the aim of this study is to examine the values that analytics provide for automated decisions services. The study followed a qualitative research approach, conducting four interviews with prominent players in the field of decision automation and decision management. The empirical data showed that analytics provides more certainty in decision making and can be used to design the initial decision services, but are more commonly used to provide insights on how the decision services can be improved. The utilization of analytics embedded in decision services, especially for predicting future outcomes based on historical data, is promptly increasing. Analytics contributes to the improvement of automated decision services, however has not been widely adapted. The study also showed that analytics performs an imperative role in decision services while at the same time continue to add value to certainty, accuracy, agility and cost reduction in a decision service context. The future perspectives of analytics in such a context include an increasing use of predictive models, to assure real-time recognition of abnormal behavior and reducing the role of subjective human thinking.