Big data and analytics: Opportunities and challenges for firm performance

The phenomenon called Big Data (BD) refers to the presence of large amounts of data that are both structured and unstructured, coming from heterogeneous sources, both internal and external to the companies. These must coexist with such amounts of data, affording challenges, and taking opportunities to improve their performance. For this reason, there is a growing demand for systems, methods, and tools favoring data processing and analysis (i.e., Big Data Analytics or BDA). The literature regarding the impact of BD and BDA on firm performance still appears fragmented and lacks an overall perspective on the matter. This work aims to systematize the recent literature about such impact, providing four perspectives of analysis. First, the corporate decision-making process needs to change because of BD exploitation and BDA implementation, inducing entities to change routines and require additional skills. Second, education and training represent a central matter to state peoples’ centrality in the process of change implied by the digital transformation. Indeed, data users remain the cornerstone of the entire process if they are and will increasingly be able to adequately manage data. In this sense, people, together with culture and technology, represent both the main barriers and the potential solutions to the here examined process of change. In particular, technology (i.e., the last perspective of analysis here examined) is increasingly and continuously going toward unexplored and unthinkable frontiers, enlarging the gap between what is recommended by scholars and what is actually implemented by decision-makers. These should embrace that the data-driven process of change is not a topic of discussion for future occurrence: It is a present corporate opportunity implying some risks and challenges.