Toward Becoming a Data-Driven Organization: Challenges and Benefits

Abstract

Organizations are looking for ways to harness the power of big data and to incorporate the shift that big data brings into their competitive strategies in order to seek competitive advantage and to improve their decision making by becoming data-driven organizations. Despite the potential benefits to be gained from becoming data-driven, the number of organizations that efficiently use it and successfully transform into data-driven organizations stays low. The emphasis in the literature has mostly been technology oriented with limited attention paid to the organizational challenges it entails. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates the challenges and benefits faced by organizations when moving toward becoming a data-driven organization. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 15 practitioners from nine software developing companies. The study identifies 49 challenges an organization may face when implementing a data-driven organization in practice, and it identifies 23 potential benefits of a data-driven organization compared to a non-data-driven organization.