With increasing maturity of analytical software tools, many companies deploy at least basic forms of business analytics to improve data-based decision making. Research about analytics in the field of information systems is currently scarce. While existing work primarily focused on capabilities for successful implementations, no attention has been paid to the role of the IT department. The goal of this paper is to explore and validate different roles of how the IT unit contributes to business value for business analytics. The proposed research model draws from the resource-based view and IT management theory. It provides a comprehensive summary of critical resources that are derived from literature. Preliminary results of case studies with nine CIOs and senior IT executives confirm the presence of four typological profiles for the IT. In a next step, we plan to formulate hypothesizes and empirically validate the model. © 2018 Association for Information Systems. All rights reserved.