Business analytics has revolutionized strategic management by enabling organizations to harness vast datasets to improve decision-making, enhance agility, and gain a competitive edge. This narrative literature review synthesizes peer-reviewed studies, focusing on organizational capabilities and managerial practices that underpin data-driven decision-making processes. Drawing from high-impact journals in management and information systems, the analysis reveals how analytics capabilities—spanning data infrastructure, analytical skills, and cultural alignment—mediate the translation of raw data into strategic outcomes. Key patterns demonstrate consistent positive linkages to firm performance through process optimization and innovation. At the same time, managerial practices emerge as critical bridges that interpret algorithmic insights and align them with organizational goals. Five interconnected research streams are identified: analytics capabilities linked to performance, data-driven strategic decision processes, organizational technology adoption, managerial dynamics in analytics-enabled environments, and analytics as a driver of innovation and competitive advantage. A conceptual synthesis model illustrates these relationships, showing pathways from capabilities through managerial practices to strategic advantages. Despite advances, tensions persist between technological determinism and a human-centric interpretation, with unresolved challenges in governance and the maturation of capabilities. This review advances the field by integrating diverse theoretical perspectives and highlighting avenues for deeper exploration of sustainable analytics-driven strategies in volatile markets.
Digital business and management research has expanded rapidly since 2017, reflecting the growing influence of digital transformation, platform ecosystems, analytics capabilities, and artificial intelligence in organizational settings. This expansion has produced a diverse and increasingly fragmented body of scholarship across strategy, information systems, innovation management, marketing, and organizational theory. Although several reviews have clarified specific subfields, the broader intellectual evolution of digital business research remains insufficiently mapped from a bibliometric perspective. This bibliometric review examines the evolution of digital business and management research. Its objective is to identify publication trends, intellectual foundations, thematic clusters, and emerging research fronts across four focal domains: digital strategy, platform-based business models, data analytics, and AI governance. By integrating performance analysis with co-citation and keyword-oriented interpretation, the article provides a structured view of how the field has developed. The analysis indicates that digital business research has moved from broad discussions of digital transformation toward more specialized debates on strategy formation, ecosystem governance, analytics-driven value creation, and responsible AI-enabled management. It also shows that the field is increasingly shaped by interdisciplinary connections between strategic management, information systems, innovation studies, and organizational governance. Five tables summarise the data source, publication trends, keyword clusters, leading contributors, and emerging research gaps. The review concludes that digital business and management research is becoming more mature, but also more complex. The next stage of scholarship requires stronger integration across platform strategy, analytics capabilities, organizational accountability, and AI governance. Future research should move beyond technological adoption narratives and examine how digital technologies reshape authority, coordination, value capture, and managerial responsibility.
Institute for Management, Business, and Accounting Studies