SOFTWARE POSITIONING TOOL TO SUPPORT SMES IN ADOPTION OF BIG DATA ANALYTICS USING A CASE STUDY APPLICATION

Abstract

Big Data Analytics is widely adopted by large companies but to a lesser extent by small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs comprise 99% of all businesses in the UK (6 million), employ 61% of the country’s workforce and generate over half of the turnover of the UK’s private sector (£2.1 trillion). SMEs represent 99% of all businesses in Europe and 90% worldwide. Therefore, assisting them to gain competitive advantage by the adoption of technology, such as Big Data Analytics is an important business initiative. The aim of this paper is to outline the process in which a positioning tool based on theoretical frameworks has been developed to help SMEs analyse their readiness to adopt Big Data Analytics using a case study. Previous work has identified 21 barriers to adoption and a methodology based on theoretical frameworks was developed to produce a positioning tool Holistic Big Data Analytics Framework for UK SMEs (HBDAF-UKSMEs). The paper outlines a case study based on a software development company to utilise this HBDAF-UKSMEs framework to assess the readiness using the proposed scoring tool for the adoption of Big Data Analytics based on three stages: pre-data analytics, business intelligence and Big Data Analytics.