Leveraging the Organisational Legacy: Understanding How Businesses Integrate Legacy Data into Their Big Data Plans

Sanjay Jha,Marilyn Wells,Michael Cowling,Meena Jha,Liam O’Brien

doi:10.3390/bdcc4020015

Sanjay Jha, Marilyn Wells + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc4020015

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Abstract

Big Data can help users attain a competitive advantage, and evidence suggests that by utilising Big Data, organisations can generate insight that can help strengthen their decision-making capabilities. However, a key issue remains that much data is trapped in legacy systems, and is hence not being appropriately retrieved and utilised. This paper builds on the existing literature base to investigate the challenges and issues organisations face in utilising Big Data. Through results of a survey with 97 respondents, this work shows that these issues can be categorised into six areas, including issues of format and structure of the data, as well as identification of the key need for a framework and architecture for organising Big Data.

Highlights

By 2025, the International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts there will be 163 zettabytes of data [1]
The survey questions were developed in discussion with Big Data experts and people in industries where there is a need for a Big Data solution, and based on literature [5,6,11,12,13,14,15,16] that indicates integrating a Big Data solution is a challenge for organisations
The statistics show that we had a good cohort of respondents having important roles in the surveyed organisations around areas such as data analytics, decision making, and business intelligence

Summary

Introduction

By 2025, the International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts there will be 163 zettabytes of data [1]. By collecting and analysing this data, businesses can understand their customers better and make better decisions. Organisations adopting Big Data solutions have been shown to have gained a significant competitive advantage [2]. The potential of Big Data is great; there remain several challenges to overcome [3]. Organisations are investing more in data manipulation, they are still not processing and using stored data to its fullest. Data stored in their data warehouses and data marts are not being retrieved and utilized in a proper way [4]. Data marts are a subset of data warehouse used to retrieve user specific data. Data in data marts and data warehouses are organised for ready retrieval, these do not support retrieval of unstructured data

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Conclusion