Generativity of Business Intelligence Platforms: A Research Agenda Guided by Lessons from Shadow IT

Abstract

To provide software platforms that are highly adjustable to users’ needs, recent literature proposes generativity, that is, platforms that may be supplemented in order to provide functionality that the designers of the platform did not have in mind. The research stream on generative platforms features a similar phenomenon as the research stream on shadow IT (SIT), because SIT also investigates supplements to integrated software-based systems that the designers of the software initially did not have in mind. Especially the domain of business intelligence (BI) is often flooded with SIT such as additional data marts and spreadsheets. However, while a wide body of literature has emerged that investigates SIT impacts, few, if any, studies examined generativity of platforms in general and BI platforms specifically. In this paper we present a literature review on positive and negative SIT impacts. Building on the results, we suggest a research agenda on generativity of BI platforms