Critical Barriers to Business Intelligence Open Source Software Adoption

Over the past few years, managers have been hard pressed to become more data-driven, and one of the prerequisites in doing so is through the adoption of Business Intelligence (BI) tools. However (1) the adoption of BI tools remains relatively low (2) the acquisition costs of proprietary BI tools are relatively high and (3) the level of satisfaction with these BI tools remain low. Given the potential of open source BI (OSBI) tools, there is a need for analyzing barriers that prevent organizations from adopting OSBI. Drawing a systematic review and a Qualitative Survey of BI Experts, this study proposes a framework that categorizes and structures 23 barriers to OSBI adoption by organizations including 4 that were identified by BI Experts but not explicitly found in the literature. This paper contributes to OSS and Information Systems (IS) research literature on BI adoption in general and provides specific insights to practitioners.