Understanding Information System Agility - The Example of Business Intelligence

To achieve strategic advantage in today's turbulent environments, it is crucial for organizations to draw increasingly faster conclusions out of changing circumstances. As most decisions today are based on data collected by Information Systems (IS), the IS itself must become more adaptable. This is particularly challenging in the domain of Business Intelligence (BI) Systems since the underlying architectural approach of enterprise-wide decision support systems is not build upon agility, but on reliability and robustness over a period of time. In order to determine the agility of BI, a unique understanding of agility and its underlying criteria is required. This paper provides a literature review which aims to summarize the known criteria from IS literature that can be applied to the domain of BI. The results can be interpreted as a framework for understanding the agility of BI systems and form the basis for generating mandatory criteria for assessing agility.