From Real-Time BI to the Real-Time Enterprise: Organizational Enablers of Latency Reduction

Real-time business intelligence (BI) plays an important role in enabling the “real-time enterprise,” and as such has received a lot of attention in the practitioner literature in recent years. However, academic research on real-time BI and its role in improving overall organizational agility is scarce today. Most research on the real-time phenomenon has focused on technological, as opposed to organizational, issues. Using practitioner models of information value as a starting point, we draw from theories on individual and organizational decision making to create a model of the components of latency that impact an organization’s ability to both sense and respond to business events in real time. Failure to take all the antecedents of these latency components into account when implementing a real-time BI system can have serious consequences on a firm’s ability to optimize benefits from conversion to real-time BI systems. We close with suggestions for future IS research on this important emerging topic.