Abstract

In today’s world of big data, organisations are battling with optimal ways to leverage data to make decisions, especially using Business Intelligence (BI) systems. Evidence from earlier research suggests that BI does not live up to its expectations. As a result, Information Systems (IS) has developed an enduring interest to research factors related to the success and failure of BI systems. One common conception of BI is the BI process that consists of four stages – the organisational memory, information integration, insight creation, and presentation. One under researched area among the BI processes is the presentation stage where BI output, in the form of visualisations, is presented to individuals to assist with decision-making. While IS researchers have contributed to this area by observing how task characteristics influence the presentation stage, there is only a few empirical studies observing the influence of user characteristics on the presentation stage. This research reports findings of the influence of user characteristics in the form of cognitive style, measured using the analytic-intuitive dimension, on visualisation format preference and decision performance. Our results indicate that decision performance in terms of decision confidence and perceived decision speed are affected by the influence of cognitive style matching the respective visualisation format. While visualisation format preference was initially unaffected by the cognitive style, we found that the removal of poor items from the Cognitive Style Index (CSI) instrument led to significant results.

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