Submitted:
01 May 2024
Posted:
07 May 2024
Read the latest preprint version here
Abstract
Keywords:
Introduction
Business Intelligence Dynamics
BI Maturity
BI Agility
Contradictions between Maturity and Agility
The Role of Cultural Factors for Bi Agility
Relation of Organizational Culture and BI Agility in Published Works
Relation of Organizational Culture and BI Agility in Interviews
- (A)
-
General issues on organization culture and agility:
- There is a contradiction between agility and rigidity in organizations, highlighting the challenge of fostering agility in inherently rigid structures (8).
- Stakeholders' ability to ask insightful questions precedes intelligence and analytics maturity, indicating a crucial aspect of organizational maturity (8).
- Context and storytelling are emphasized in information delivery, contrasting with a mere data-centric approach, reflecting the importance of effective communication (8).
- While agile principles emphasize teamwork, individual rewards can create conflicts, showcasing a tension between collective success and individual recognition (10).
- Organizational agility is more about management and culture than company size, with leadership playing a pivotal role in fostering innovation and adopting new practices (12).
- (B)
-
Value added by shared insights:
- Collaboration with professionals from diverse backgrounds yields valuable insights without divulging confidential information, highlighting the benefits of knowledge exchange (7).
- Overcoming communication barriers between introverted analysts requires creating spaces for open dialogue (7).
- Cultural differences between business and IT can hinder agility, with differing priorities and approaches to change and stability (9).
- Lack of horizontal communication and unclear processes impede BI effectiveness, emphasizing the importance of streamlined information flow (15).
- (C)
-
Stepping out of your comfort zone / embracing trial-and-error:
- Analysts' focus on internal data often overlooks external market factors, highlighting the need for a broader perspective (7).
- Learning and adapting are essential competencies for navigating dynamic environments (7).
- Ineffective BI tools or usage can be attributed to a lack of intelligence culture and failure to see the bigger picture (13, 15).
Conclusions
References
- Aghina, W., Ahlback, K., De Smet, A., Lackey, G., Lurie, M., Murarka, M., & Handscomb, C. (2015). The five trademarks of agile organizations. McKinsey & Company.
- Baars, H., Hütter, H. (2015) A framework for identifying and selecting measures to enhance BI-agility. Proceedings of the 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 4712-4721.
- Bieda, L. C. (2020). How Organizations Can Build Analytics Agility. MIT Sloan Management Review, October 13, 2020.
- Castro, A., Machado, J., Roggendorf, M., & Soller, H. (2020) How to build a data architecture to drive innova- tion today and tomorrow. McKinsey & Company.
- Cosic, R., Shanks, G., & Maynard, S. (2012) Towards a Business Analytics Capability Maturity Model. Proceedings of the 23rd Australasian Conference on Information Systems. 14.
- Elliott, T. (2014). 5 Top Tips for Agile Analytics Organizations.
- Gregory, P., Taylor, K. (2019) Defining Agile Culture: A Collaborative and Practitioner-Led Approach. 2019 IEEE/ACM 12h International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE).
- Hribar Rajteric, I. (2010). Overview of business intelligence maturity models. Management, 15(1), 47-67.
- Knabke, T., Olbrich, S. (2016). Capabilities to achieve business intelligence agility – research model and tenta- tive results. Proceedings of Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2016).
- Lennerholt, C. (2022) Facilitating the Implementation and Use of Self Service Business Intelligence.
- Majchrzak, A., Logan, D., McCurdy, R., & Kirchmer, M. (2006) What Business Leaders Can Learn from Jazz Musicians About Emergent Processes. In: Agility by ARIS Business Process Management (2006). Ed. By Scheer, A.-W., Kruppke, H., Jost, W., & Kindermann, H. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
- Negash, S., Gray, P. (2003) Business Intelligence. Proceedings of the 2003 Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), 3190-3199.
- Newell, S., Wagner, E.L., & David, G. (2007) Clumsy Information Systems. In: DeSouza, K. (Ed.) Agile Information Systems-Conceptualization, Construction, and Management. Burlington, MA: Elsevier.
- Olszak, C. (2013) Assessment of Business Intelligence Maturity in the Selected Organizations. Proceedings of the 2013 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, 951-958.
- Passlick, J., Guhr, N., Lebek, B., & Breitner, M. H. (2020) Encouraging the Use of Self-Service Business Intelligence an Examination of Employee-Related Influencing Factors. Journal of Decision Systems, 29, 1-26. [CrossRef]
- Raber, D., Wormann, F., & Winter, R. (2013) Towards the Measurement of Business Intelligence Maturity. Proceedings of the 2013 European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 95.
- Seo, D., & LaPaz, A. 1. (2008) Exploring the Dark Side of IS in Achieving Organizational Agility. Communications of the ACM, 51(11), 136-139. [CrossRef]
- Schlesinger, P.A., & Rahman, N. (2016) Self-Service Business Intelligence Resulting in Disruptive Technology. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 56, 11-21. [CrossRef]
- Tallon, P. P., Queiroz, M., Coltman, T., & Sharma, R. (2019). Information technology and the search for organizational agility: A systematic review with future research possibilities. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 28, 218-237. [CrossRef]
- Vejseli, S., Rossmann, A., & Connolly, Th. (2020) Agility matters! Agile Mechanisms in IT Governance and their Impact on Firm Performance. Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 5633- 5642.
- Suša Vugec, D.S., Bosilj Vukšić, B., Pejić Bach, M., Jaklič, J., & Indihar Štemberger, M. (2020) Business intelligence and organizational performance. Business Process Management Journal, 26(6), 1709-1730. [CrossRef]
- Yousif, M., & Pessi, K. (2016). IT Agility Research Review: Thematic Analysis and Categorization of Literature. PACIS 2016 Proceedings, 205.
- Zimmer, M., Baars, H., & Kemper, H. (2012). The impact of agility requirements on business intelligence architectures. Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 45, 4189-4198.
| BI maturity | BI agility |
|---|---|
| Has a finite point as its goal, developing to- wards alignment and optimization | Does not have a finite point; instead maintains flexibility and preparation for change |
| Criteria of efficiency and utilization | Criteria of resilience and competence preservation |
| One path or alternative; one set of activities in its current version to be developed and optimized | Many paths, alternatives or versions without aiming at optimization |
| Maturity reflects a single instance of coupling between BI and organization | Agility seeks to cover a larger context (includes external factors) and longer time window (covering possible future changes) |
| Features of organizational culture, impacting BI agility | Literature sources | Interview responses |
|---|---|---|
| Organizational culture type | Gregory and Taylor (2019) specify the levels of agile culture by dimensions purpose, leadership, people feel, collaboration, trust, change acceptance, innovation and failures. Seo and LaPaz (2008) stress the importance of organizational culture for informing function to sup- port organizational agility. Newell et al (2007), discussing mechanistic and organistic organization types, define the former as clumsy and impairing agility. |
(8) If a rigid organization wants to be agile, a contradiction emerges. (10) Agile principles need teamwork success, but rewards are individual – a controversy (12) Organizational culture is a defining factor for BI culture. |
| Clear strategy, goals, metrics | Vejseli et al (2020): Bench- marking between programs and projects. Gregory and Taylor (2019): Organizational purpose is clear and compelling. |
(8) A feature of organization maturity is the ability of stake- holders to ask well-pointed questions that is ahead of intelligence & analytics maturity. (10) The strategic direction is too wide, lacks clarity, and risks of different interpretation emerge. (12) The existence of BI strategy sets ground for BI culture development. Clear strategic vision provides focus regarding goals and resources for their fulfilment. |
| Decision delegation to lower levels | Youssif & Pessi (2016): Decision making and hier- archies. Aghina et al (2015): Decisions made both for stability and dynamic capability. |
(9) Decision delegation to lower levels. |
| Information sharing, analytical communities | Vejseli et al (2020): Cross boundary committees to integrate all stakeholders; sharing information and success. Youssif & Pessi (2016): In- formation management and sharing. Bieda (2020): Culture of collaboration from formal to informal to gain insights from multiple and deeper perspectives. Gregory and Taylor (2019): cross-functional collaboration. Maurer (2010): stresses interpersonal and social skills in proposed IS agility construct. |
(7) In a new organization I deal with independent colleagues from non-competing organizations in the same areas – BI architects, data scientists. I talk to healthcare BI architects from Switzerland, search engine data analysts from other places, and essentially it is a win-win, because in fact we do not mention confidential stuff once, and instead ask: “How’s your data model? And yours?” (7) A frequent topic among analysts in terms of figures is: everyone is looking at their data, and very few consider the market situation. This part is neglected, and no one thinks about it: only internal data matter, when almost no one cares about external data to benchmark against market, competition or other external factors. (8) Removal of cultural barriers. (9) Collaboration and information sharing are essential for the development of BI culture. (15) Information sharing and cooperation processes could be better defined. Lack of horizontal informing-commerce/sales do not care about delivery costs from logistics. |
| Business and IT cooperation; barrier removal | Elliott (2014): The im- portance of community of business and IT across functional silos. Bieda (2020): stresses the culture of collaboration to gain insights into deeper perspectives. |
[8] A feature of organization maturity is the ability of stake- holders to ask well-pointed questions that are ahead of intelligence & analytics maturity…. Context and storytelling are of prime importance when delivering information. [9] Cultural differences between business and IT: business culture works towards frequent and fast changes; IT/engineering culture – towards stable operating systems. [11] BI receives no feedback from business on how data are used for decisions. |
| Learning, experimenting, expertise preservation; mistake tolerance |
Majchrzak et al (2006): Build a mental map of other’s expertise. Elliott (2014): Sandboxes as specific BI service. Tallon et al (2019): Promotion of culture of calculated risk taking and idea testing. |
[7] The ability to learn and get out of the comfort zone is a valuable competence. [8] Most important human feature for flexibility is the will to learn and unlearn. [10] In some places, we do not have a “speak-up” culture. [13] The data shown by BI tool were so embarrassing that the system had been left to die. [15] During change implementation, volumes of valuable experience have been recorded and are currently in use. Human competences need to be non-static. |
Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).