Aligning management controls and information systems: contingent organisational design of business intelligence application architectures

Corporate management of today's multi-business companies has become increasingly complex, leading to a heavy reliance on formal management controls (MCs) such as planning and reporting. Business intelligence (BI) solutions promise a better support of those tasks by providing analytical applications, technologies, and processes. Although research on MCs is well driven by contingent design, comparable contingent BI design is missing. Existing research mostly focuses on general BI frameworks. As MCs determine an important share of the vertical and horizontal information flows of a corporation and of the functional requirements on BI, this article advocates a contingent design of BI application architectures derived from organisation-specific MCs. Therefore, this article outlines three typical designs of MCs (single industry, financial holding, and management holding) and derives three corresponding BI application architectures. Such a view improves the understanding of BI design and helps to facilitate aligned organisational design of MCs and BI.