Institutionalization of Business Intelligence for Enhancing Organizational Agility in Developing Countries: An Example of Bangladesh

This research aims to explore how the institutionalization of Business Intelligence (BI) can enhance organizational agility in developing countries. Constant diverse changes occurring within the environment have been providing the source of various opportunities or threats for businesses that affect the stability of business performance. Decision-making to cope with the changing environment becomes a challenge for taking opportunities and/or managing threats. Making an effective decision for responding to the changing environment necessitates scanning the changing environment. Organizational agility is the ability to sense and respond to those changes with speed. Having data access to detect and anticipate the studied environment for making a decision is required for achieving organizational agility. BI assimilates, processes, analyzes, and transforms raw data into information to support decision-making. BI provides data-driven decision-making support. Therefore, BI should be designed and implemented to enhance organizational agility to manage anticipated and unanticipated changes occurring within the environment. BI institutionalization is the process of culture cultivation of using BI to support data-driven decision-making across the business. This research proposes that increased institutionalization of BI can enhance the organizational agility of a business. However, there has been little prior research in this area, focusing on developing countries. Therefore, this research addresses the research gap in how BI institutionalization in developing countries can enhance organizational agility. A literature review develops a conceptual model proposing a positive association between BI institutionalization and organizational agility. The conceptual model encompasses ten antecedents for BI institutionalization and four consecutive stages (informal, operational, divisional, and corporate) used to measure the maturity level of BI institutionalization. A multiple case study approach was conducted for collecting qualitative data using semi-structured interviews. Bangladesh is used as an example of a developing country. Data were collected from five case studies from the banking industry in Bangladesh. Following the interpretivism paradigm, the studied data were inductively analyzed to generate a new understanding of how BI institutionalization impacts organizational agility for decision-making in the context of developing countries. These findings were used to find support/refinement of the conceptual model. The research findings suggest that different case studies have different maturity levels of BI institutionalization depending on the BI antecedents. The research findings suggest that the maturity of BI institutionalization for the case studies 1 (A), 2 (B), 3 (C), 4 (D), and 5 (E) have been identified at operational, operational, divisional, corporate, and corporate levels associated with weaker, weaker, fair, stronger, and stronger agility, respectively. The research has practical, theoretical, knowledge-focused, and methodological contributions.