Investigating the Assimilation of Business Intelligence in Business: Analyzing the Role of External Pressures and the Commitment of Top Managers in Crisis Situations

Abstract Business intelligence is often used as a modifier, especially in times of crisis, but it seems it is not well absorbed and assimilated across organizations that have adopted it, and this is rooted in the institutional theory and high-level theory. The purpose of this study is to investigate the assimilation of business intelligence by considering external pressures and the commitment of managers in critical situations in companies under the Endowment Productivity Foundation of Astan Quds Razavi. This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-survey in nature. The statistical population of this research is 44 companies of Astan Quds Razavi Endowment Productivity Foundation. In this regard, 3 questionnaires were sent to senior and influential managers in a non-random manner. Based on this, the data were collected from 132 managers. The research tool was Chaubey and Kumar’s (2021) questionnaire. To evaluate the validity of the instrument, content validity (according to experts’ judgments), and to check the validity of the structure, convergent and divergent validity, and factor analysis were used. The Cronbach's alpha value was estimated to be 0.877, which is in the acceptable range. Data analysis was performed using the structural equation modeling method and SmartPlus3 software. The findings showed that the factors of forced external norms (normative and imitative) have a significant impact on the commitment of top managers to innovate in business intelligence. The commitment of top managers through acceptance and normalization affects the assimilation of business intelligence. Introduction The pandemic crisis resulting from COVID-19 has transformed the lives of citizens and organizations’ way of doing business. The pandemic has triggered humanity to find innovative ways of doing business to keep the sinking economy afloat. Although, we often blame COVID-19 and the pandemic for the current crisis. However, the pandemic has offered significant insight into our hidden problems that have plagued our world economy. It has exposed our weaknesses and reflected our capabilities to deal with such a health crisis. The power of emerging technology has been understood during the pandemic crisis to fight against the disruptions caused by the pandemic crisis (Dwivedi et al., 2020; Ivanov, 2020). Business intelligence is often used as a modifier of the situation, especially in times of epidemic crises. Although most managers are familiar with