Should Data Structures Look Flat for End Users?

ABSTRACT

Recent developments in business intelligence have not only led to the availability of more and more heterogeneous data but also to more and more heterogeneous user groups accessing them. Consequently, software vendors offer products with various views on data, wishing to give all users an easy access to the data. We conduct an online experiment among end users with varying analytical expertise for an empirical examination on how data should be structured for presentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Data models
• business intelligence (BI)
• experiment
• survival analysis
• ad-hoc reporting
• OLAP

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Schulz

Michael Schulz is Professor of Information Systems at the NORDAKADEMIE Hochschule der Wirtschaft in Elmshorn, Germany. He earned his doctoral degree in Business Administration from Philipps University of Marburg. He has published in Business & Information Systems Engineering, International Journal of Information Management, Information Processing and Management, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). His area of expertise is databases and analytical information systems. His research interests include data science, data modeling and self-service business intelligence. He has extensive experience in consulting large organizations in business intelligence and data science.

Paul Alpar

Paul Alpar is Professor of MIS at Philipps University of Marburg. He has been before a faculty member at University of Illinois, Chicago, and a Visiting Scholar at the universities of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Tel-Aviv, Israel; California, Berkeley; Georgia State, Atlanta. His research interests include IS value determination, decision support, and electronic business. He has published in Journal of MIS, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Organizational Computing, Int. Journal of Electronic Commerce, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Information and Management, Journal of Productivity Analysis, and many other journals. He is also (co-)author of five books (in German).

Patrick Winter

Patrick Winter earned his doctoral degree in Business Administration and Information Systems (with distinction) from Philipps University of Marburg. He has published in International Journal of Inf. Management, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Electronic Markets, Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). He is currently an entrepreneur. His research interests include business intelligence and digital marketing, with a particular focus on quantitative modeling.