Big data analytics, dynamic capabilities and firm performance

Big data analytics, dynamic capabilities and firm performance Big data has high operational and strategic potential vis-à-vis business value creation and is simply the next big thing in innovation (Gobble, 2013) as it creates actionable ideas for firm performance and competitive advantage (Wamba et al., 2015).Big data necessitates much more than application of new analytics (El-Kassar and Singh, 2018) as firms that learn to take advantage of big data unbridle new organizational abilities and value (Davenport et al., 2012).It is also pertinent to note that corporate commitment to the use of big data analytics is very important as past literature suggest that the corporate commitment affects big data assimilation through acceptance and routinization routes (Singh and El-Kassar, 2019) and that in turn to enhance sustainable performance of the firms (Coluccia et al., 2019).Several colleagues also suggest that for firms to have superior performance from their employees, they need to leverage analytics over the gut instincts (Del Giudice et al., 2018;Davenport et al., 2010) and that calls for a data driven decision-making culture (Santoro et al., 2019;Soto-Acosta et al., 2018;McAfee et al., 2012).Needless to mention that use of business analytics for organizational value creation is dependent upon the roles played by the organizational decision-making processes, including resource allocation processes and resource orchestration processes (Helfat et al., 2009;Teece, 1997) which requires examination and deeper understanding.The extant literature suggests several examples of big data initiatives and treating it as firm's dynamic capabilities that help create business relevant knowledge, to add value, enhance performance and give competitive advantage to the firms over their rivals in the dynamic market, still top managers are conspicuously reluctant to regularly allocate resources to facilitate big data analytics (El-Kassar and Singh, 2018) for sustainable development of people, process, and organization (Budhwar et al., 2018;Singh, 2018;Al-Ali et al., 2017).Therefore, the aforementioned literature on big data for enhancing firm dynamic capabilities and performance suggest for an urgent need to examine them in much detail.It is in this context, we believe that the papers published in this special issue on "Big data analytics, dynamic capabilities, and firm performance" try to fill in the existing gaps in the literature and also to provide direction for future researches.The first paper titled "Organizational capabilities that enable big data and predictive analytics diffusion and organizational performance: A resource-based perspective" is contextualized in Indian context.The study suggests that big data and predictive analytic (BDPA) mediates the influence of information technology deployment and human resource capabilities on organizational performance.Therefore, it suggests that BDPA plays critical role in business decisions in firms in India.The second paper titled "Turning information quality into firm performance in big data economy" explores how information quality dynamics links the business value, the user satisfaction and the firm performance in the big data environment.This study was conducted in two countries -France, and the USAand extends literature on big data literature, using appraisal-emotional response-coping framework, and suggests how to use information quality modeling vis-à-vis firm performance.The next paper titled "Identifying industry 4.0 IoT enablers by integrated PCA-ISM-DEMATEL approach" suggests that IoT ecosystem and IoT Big Data are the critical enablers of the industry 4.0.This study used integrated approach-based hierarchical model and cause-effect relationship amongst the IoT enablers and the authors suggest them as novel initiative for the industry 4.0.