Enabling organizational agility through self-service business intelligence: The case of a digital marketplace

Many organizations have adopted business intelligence and analytics systems in order to cope with the increasing digitalization of data intensive environments. In this paper, we study the role of self-service business intelligence (SSBI), a certain capability provided by a business intelligence system, in enabling organizational agility. In particular, the research question we address is as follows: How does self-service business intelligence enable organizational agility in a multi-sided platform? We focus on two types of organizational agility – namely, market capitalizing agility and operational adjustment agility – and identify how SSBI enables these capabilities in a multi-sided platform environment. We conducted 12 qualitative interviews focusing on Norway’s biggest digital marketplace, Finn.no. Our results indicate that SSBI plays an important role in enabling 1) market capitalizing agility by providing a better understanding of supply and demand participants, more access to traffic data and user clickstreams, fast response to requests, and increased access to supply and demand navigation behavior and 2) operational adjustment agility by redefining current organizational structures, empowering employees, providing equal access to organizational level data and opportunities for data manipulation. The findings provide empirical evidence for the role of SSBI in enabling organizational agility within the context of a multi-sided platform environment.