Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Big Data: A Literature Review

With the accelerated advances in information technology that affected every aspect of the modern, quick-paced life, and the huge influx of data being stored about almost everything we do; we are struggling to catch up and make sense of what is going on around us. Big data offers a viable way to understand the modern world and to transform this influx of data into usable information and insights that allow for better decision making, and in the case of businesses, to achieve competitive advantage over competitors; as big data promises to provide the means for making the right decision at the right time based on faster, more accurate, more efficient, and more effective aggregation and analysis of internal and external sources of data, in ways that are unparalleled in human history. This paper reviews literature to find out in what ways can big data add value to firms, what are the challenges in implementing big data, and why big data projects tends to fail. Finally, based on the literature review findings, the paper discusses whether big data can really generate competitive advantage against competitors, by analyzing the findings under the resource-based-view of the firm theory.