تکنولوژی مه داده : بررسی عملی به کار گیری آن و مزایا و ریسکهایش برای شرکت ها Big data technologies: An empirical investigation on their adoption, benefits and risks for companies

1. Introduction Companies have to deal with profound changes in the way they manage their business, their customers and their business models, since they are overrun by a data-driven revolution in management (Tambe, 2014). This is taking place because new opportunities are emerging thanks to the fast evolution of big data technologies and to the enormous availability of data that firms can capture from many sources, such as social media activities, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, web information, mobile phone usage and consumer preferences expressed on the web (Davenport, 2014). In view of the increasing importance of big data, companies can leverage on these data to exploit new opportunities and gain an indepth understanding of the hidden values. Companies in many industries are increasingly interested in their potentialities, since they can generate high revenues. As stated by the International Data Corporation (IDC, 2016) “Big data and business analytics worldwide revenues will grow from nearly $122 B in 2015 to more than $187 B in 2019, an increase of more than 50% over the five-year forecast period”. Big data can be obtained from within and outside companies, in the form of structured and unstructured data, and it can generates diffi- culties for companies in capturing, aggregating, analysing and extracting value from them (Gandomi & Haider, 2015). As stated by McAfee, Brynjolfsson, Davenport, Patil and Barton (2012) “businesses are collecting more data than they know what to do with”. However, they need to develop new skills and a new management style to turn all this information into a competitive advantage. In order to achieve this goal, and considering the managerial complexity involved in dealing with such an enormous quantity of data, as well as the difficulties that companies may have in managing them, managers should not underestimate the positive and negative issues that need to be taken into account in the exploitation of big data. For this reason, managers need to be aware not only of its positive effects, but also of its negative ones in order to avoid being unprepared when they decide to invest and to derive value from big data. In this direction, there is scant empirical evidence about the benefits and risks associated with the exploitation of big data for business goals. Till now, literature has provided very little empirical evidence on these issues, and the key contribution of this paper is therefore to enrich the studies that investigate the issues related to big data by empirically studying, through a survey analysis on a sample of 200 companies, the benefits and risks of big data at a company level. This topic is acquiring importance in literature, since the benefits and risks need to be identified, managed and controlled if managers want to derive value from their investments in big data technologies. This paper also provides statistics about the type of big data sources used by companies, and the big data technologies that are adopted. In order to achieve these aims, the differences that emerge according to the size and to a company industrial sector have also been investigated.