Business intelligence and cognitive loads: Proposition of a dashboard adoption model

Decision makers in organizations strive to improve the quality of their decisions. One way to improve that process is to objectify the decisions with facts. Data-driven Decision Support Systems (data-driven DSS), and more specifically business intelligence (BI) intend to achieve this. Organizations invest massively in the development of BI data-driven DSS and expect them to be adopted and to effectively support decision makers. This raises many technical and methodological challenges, especially regarding the design of BI dashboards, which can be seen as the visible tip of the BI data-driven DSS iceberg and which play a major role in the adoption of the entire system. In this paper, the dashboard content is investigated as one possible root cause for BI data-driven DSS dashboard adoption or rejection through an early empirical research. More precisely, this work is composed of three parts. In the first part, the concept of cognitive loads is studied in the context of BI dashboards and the informational, the representational and the non-informational loads are introduced. In the second part, the effects of these loads on the adoption of BI dashboards are then studied through an experiment with 167 respondents and a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis. The result is a Dashboard Adoption Model, enriching the seminal Technology Acceptance Model with new content-oriented variables to support the design of more supportive BI data-driven DSS dashboards. Finally, in the third part, a set of indicators is proposed to help dashboards designers in the monitoring of the loads of their dashboards practically.