Mobilizing Intuitive Judgement during Organizational Decision Making: When Business Intelligence Is Not the Only Thing That Matters

Academics have argued that data-driven decision processes will replace intuitive judgements, but the empirical aspects of this claim are understudied. We provide empirical findings of how managers communicate and share intuitive judgements when BI system's output is prescribed to be the main information source for decision making. We investigate organizational decision making regarding IT project portfolio investments. We used a rich empirical dataset from a longitudinal, qualitative study investigating the prioritization of IT projects in a large financial institution. Our findings show that decision makers employ four techniques to communicate and share intuitive judgements during organizational decision making, which built on the BI output. Furthermore, we found that the use of these techniques depends on the decision maker's familiarity with the group and the convergence of perceptions about either a project, or specific issues in the group.