The Role of Managers in Big Data Analytics

Abstract: Insights from Big Data can become sources of competitive advantage and a foundation for decision-making, leading to an extended use of such technologies in many firms’ departments. Even if it is common practice to invest in BDA, oftentimes these techniques are not exploited correctly, resulting in an unrewarded effort by companies (Dahiya, Le, Ring & Watson, 2022). Research has contributed to exploring the positive business impacts that the implementation of BDA brings (Raguseo & Vitari, 2018), however, the role of managers that are directly responsible for the BDA-related operations and decision-making has been scarcely addressed. With this research, we aim to understand the role of managers regarding BDA, and what they perceive as the value they contributed in terms of business performance. We have adopted a qualitative analysis approach, alongside an inductive approach that has helped us understand the managers’ perspectives in using BDA to improve firm performance. The findings that were identified include key challenges that managers face using BDA, an interdependent relationship between essential hard and soft skills for managers of BDA, support of a BDA Resource-Based View framework, beneficial traits of managerial styles and positions in using BDA as well as future trends in BDA adoption and the future integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in BDA technologies.