Mythologies of Business Intelligence.

We present results from a case study of the use of business intelligence (BI) systems in a human services organization. In their organizational trajectory towards a "culture of data," our informants perceived four values associated with BI: data-driven, predictive and proactive, shared accountability, and inquisitive. Each value corresponds to a mythology of big data and BI. For each, we highlight the ways in which the enactment of the mythology is problematized by disconnects between aggregate and drill-down views of data that often impede the desired actionability. Our findings contribute initial empirical evidence of the ways in which the epistemological biases of BI systems influence organizations. We suggest design implications for better enabling data-driven decision making.