Big Data and IT-Enabled Services: Ecosystem and Coevolution

Big data goes beyond datasets and is more than an IT priority. This article positions big data in the context of business, technology, and innovation, and presents a service-oriented and evolutionary view of big data as a case of disruptive IT-enabled innovation. Big data services are IT-enabled services that emerge as a result of combining diverse data-focused resources from the ecosystem of technologies, market needs, social actors, and other institutional contexts. These services have already had far-reaching effects on business practices. The big data services ecosystem has changed over time through an evolutionary process of variation and selective retention. Businesses and governments should actively experiment with novel big data services by dynamically configuring heterogeneous resources from the ever-changing big data ecosystem. © 1999-2012 IEEE.