The Role of Big Data in Influencing Strategic Decision-Making for Organizations: A Review

Abstract

 In an issue of Financial Executive, authors in [1] argued that “tomorrow’s competitive advantage will be driven by the ability to consume, produce and govern complex information inside and outside the company walls” .  Johnson’s statement reflects the belief shared by a growing number of business analysts that Big Data offers many opportunities for companies to make better decisions and to increase the value of their products and services [2,3,4,5]. Big Data, which is one of the hottest topics in the business press and scholarly business literature, can be generally defined as high-volume, extremely large scale data gathering and data analytics[4] . This paper provides a focused review of literature on the increasingly important role of Big Data in strategic management, with special attention to the role of Big Data in strategic decision-making.  The major questions investigated through this review of literature were: What kind of decisions is being supported by Big Data in organizations today?  Does Big Data help organizations make better decisions?  How can organizations best make use of Big Data to support strategic decision-making?