Towards a Theory of Agile Dashboards for Service Oriented Organizations

Research on the agile and adaptive enterprise promotes real time dashboards as a powerful tool to provide coordination and control. Recent trends in market volatility have led firms to restructure around what organizational theorists term an “adhocracy”. Service oriented architecture represents an emerging architectural mechanism to align an organization’s processes with the flexible structure of such an organizational form. A theory of dashboard creation and implementation that addresses the organizational characteristics of an adhocracy (as exposed through the formalism of a service oriented architecture) is needed in order to develop a grounded methodology for dashboard creation and implementation that targets the coordination and control requirements of this evolving organizational structure. This research seeks to provide such a theoretical foundation grounded in the context of two diverse case studies. Cementing a theory base for dashboard creation and implementation helps to formalize the role of dashboards in service oriented organizations and provides the first step towards developing a methodology for dashboard design and use in an agile environment.