Research agenda

The synthesis of literature should lead to the identification of open research questions. Based on the findings from the literature review, we create a research agenda that comprises the major BI & A 3.0 characteristics that are currently underrepresented in the IS research community. Therefore, Vom Brocke et al. suggest applying a concept matrix to provide a basis for further research. We follow that approach and conceptualize the current research gaps of BI & A 3.0 by selecting the most underrepresented characteristics and corresponding dimensions. The results of our literature review reveal that three out of seven dimensions have at least three underrepresented characteristics: Application area, Research method, and Emerging research area.

We do not believe that technology plays an important role in future BI & A 3.0 research. Since the introduction and wide-spread of cloud computing, we perceive data storage as commodity and do not regard the topic as a primary research topic in the future. Thus, this dimension does not appear in the proposed research agenda. Furthermore, we argue for a less important role of analytics techniques. Our results reveal that outstanding IS research papers, investigating BI & A 3.0, are not depended on technologies. 23 research results do not apply any analytic technique. For the same reason, we also perceive analysis maturity as less important dimension. Nevertheless, we noted that the maturity levels "diagnostic" and "prescriptive" are underrepresented, which motivates the development of research questions, addressing particularly these maturity levels.

Finally, data privacy does not appear in our research agenda framework, because we perceive this dimension as immanent in each BI & A 3.0 research work. Each beneficial application of data analytics comes along with ethical issues, such as data privacy concerns. Independently from a concrete research question, we argue for the relevance of data privacy and encourage researchers to extend each BI & A 3.0 project by a separate sub project that investigates data privacy risks.

We mark each suggested research question with an ongoing number. The whole cube with all dimensional values is depicted in Fig. 13. By combining the remaining three dimensions, we create a cube metaphor that helps identifying research topics, which received no or only little attention in IS research. In addition, the cube metaphor supports the classification of other research artifacts in the field of BI & A 3.0. In the following, we introduce and discuss each research dimension and provide exemplary research questions.

Fig. 13


Research agenda dimensions and exemplary questions