This paper presents a model, synthesized from the literature, of factors that explain how business analytics contributes to business value. It also reports results from a preliminary assessment of that model. The model consists of two parts: a process and a variance model. The process model depicts the analyze‐insight‐decision‐action process through which use of an organization's business analytic capabilities is intended to create business value. The variance model proposes that the five factors in Davenport et al.'s DELTA model of business analytics success factors, six from Watson & Wixom and three from Seddon et al.'s model of organizational benefits from enterprise systems, assist a firm to gain business value from business analytics. A preliminary assessment of the model was conducted using data from 100 customer success stories from vendors such as IBM, SAP and Teradata. Our conclusion is that the business analytics success model is likely to be a useful basis for future research.