In-Memory Technology and the Agility of Business Intelligence – A Case Study at a German Sportswear Company

The retail industry has changed significantly due to altered shopping behavior of customers and technological advancements in recent years. This enforces organizations to quickly adapt to these dynamically evolving circumstances. Most of the major organizations utilize Business intelligence (BI) to support their corporate strategies. Therefore, the adaptability of BI gained increasing importance in theory and industry practice over the last years. Agility is particularly challenging in the domain of BI since the underlying architecture of enterprise-wide decision support with data warehouse (DWH)- based BI is not built upon agility, but on reliability and robustness. Although the usage of agile project approaches like Scrum has been explored, there is still a lack of research investigating further effects on BI agility. Hence, we analyzed whether the characteristics of DWH and BI impact the agility of BI in an in-depth case study at a globally operating German sportswear designer and manufacturer. In particular, we want to identify if a technology like in-memory can help to achieve more BI agility. The findings indicate that IM technology acts as a technology enabler for agile BI. The impact of some DWH characteristics on BI agility is significantly positively influenced if IM technology is used