Big Data Projects: Strategic Disruption or Storm in a Teacup?

Jiwat is a seasoned professional with proven skills and varied academic- and industry-based background in project management. Jiwat brings in contemporary skills and knowledge of current trends in PM.

  Business Intelligence   Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

After the internet and e-commerce, Big Data analytics—with its associated technologies—seems to be the next highly significant digitalization effort, one that is expected to bring fundamental changes to business operations, economies and societies in both the short and long term.

However, stories of many failed Big Data projects (both reported and not reported) have cast doubts on the strategic necessity and value of these projects (Marr, 2015; Asay, 2014). This raises the question of whether Big Data analytics and the associated technologies are a strategic disruption for organizational productivity, or just another hyped-up pretender of business value—a storm in a business teacup?

In a report by Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), Richard Petley, director of PwC Risk and Assurance (White, 2015), points to the dilemma by suggesting "Data is the lifeblood of the digital economy, it can give insight, inform decisions and deepen relationships…it can be bought, sold, shared and even stolen—all things that suggest that data has value. Yet when we conducted our research, very few organizations can attribute a value and, more concerning, many do not yet have the capabilities we would expect to manage, protect and extract that value."

Most organizations are adamant (perhaps rightly so) to derive value from the data that they collect on an …

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