2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
The Big Data Analytics Gold Rush:
A Research Framework for Coordination and Governance
J. Alberto Espinosa
Kogod School of Business
American University
alberto@american.edu
Abstract
Big data analytics (BDA) is rapidly becoming a
most critical activity for organizations. Examples of
how BDA enhances the competitive advantage of
organizations abound in the literature, which has
created a gold-rush-like atmosphere. The predictions
about shortages of specialized analytical labor has
caused every major university to launch big data,
analytics or data science programs, and every major
organization to adopt aggressive BDA initiatives. The
promise of enhanced competitiveness and sustainable
strategic advantage are appealing and virtually all
major decisions need to be backed up with data. This
has substantial implications for organizations, which
need to align their business process architectures, data
architectures and data management practices to
support BDA initiatives. But while most research in this
area has focused on either building BDA capabilities or
on the benefits that these capabilities bring to
organization, we know little about how this effort can
be most effectively coordinated and governed to ensure
organizational success. In this research we develop a
research framework to study whether and how
coordination and governance influence BDA outcomes.
We build on the foundations of coordination theory and
information systems governance.
1. Introduction
Organizations will find there is little value in just
storing large amounts of data. Business value can only
be derived from data once it is captured, organized and
analyzed to discover and provide an understanding of
relationships, trends, patterns and other insights that
enhance decision-making and problem-solving. The use
of use of analytics as a competitive differentiator in
selected industries is exploding in just about every
discipline, marketing, sales, human resources, IT
management, and finance. There are multiple studies
and articles in the popular press claiming that
organization adopting data-driven decision making
achieve higher productivity gains.
1530-1605/16 $31.00 © 2016 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2016.141
Frank Armour
Kogod School of Business
American University
fjarmour@gmail.com
The abundance of success stories in the popular
press [1, 2] has lead educational institutions and
organizations to embark in a rush to implement BDA
programs. But most recipes for BDA success center
around building BDA capabilities [3, 4]. While there is
no doubt that having a sound strategy and practice in the
area of BDA is critical for business decision making,
simply having such a BDA practice is insufficient for
organizational success that is sustainable over time.
Studies are finding that as BDA continues to be
embraced widely, the competitive advantage of
individual organizations using BDA will erode and data
management challenges will continue to become
overwhelming and costly [5]. We argue in this article
that BDA capabilities are necessary for BDA success,
but these capabilities alone are insufficient, and that
effective coordination and governance of BDA is
necessary.
BDA is a complex endeavor because it sits at the
intersection of various disciplines, including: data
management, analytical processes and tools, functional
domains, data types and sources, and the business
processes that BDA aims to support [6]. The various
activities in these areas are highly interdependent, thus
requiring a substantial amount of coordination, which is
about managing dependencies among the associated
task activities [7]. Furthermore, because data has
substantial implications on important things like:
privacy, ethics, responsible practices, legal aspects,
ownership, and intellectual property, among other
things, big data analytics governance is of paramount
importance to organizational success. To the best of our
knowledge, this perspective has not been thoroughly
investigated in research.
In this article we develop an initial research
framework to study BDA coordination and governance
by integrating three different bodies of research: BDA,
coordination theory and IT governance. The integration
of these three research areas is very important because,
while each area has been recognized as important in the
respective literature, the integration of the three provide
a powerful lens to understand what leads to the success
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of BDA initiatives. As far as we know, no attempts have
been made in the research literature to address these
issues. This presents an excellent opportunity to develop
a sound framework to guide further studies of enterprise
architecting. In the next 3 sections we discuss each of
these 3 perspectives in more detail. In section 5 we
discuss the BDA outcomes, leading to our proposed
research approach and framework described in section
6, followed by a concluding discussion section.
2. Big Data Analytics
Before we start we need to address some of the
confusions we often hear about, especially with respect
to terminology used in reference to BDA. BDA can
mean different things to different people, therefore it is
important that we define these terms more precisely.
BDA encompasses three related disciplines, contained
in its name – big data, analytics and big data analytics.
For the purposes of this research, we use the term BDA
to refer to any combination of these three disciplines,
which we briefly discuss next.
Big Data – Big data is about gathering, storing,
managing and accessing the necessary data for
analytics. The term “big” is often used and abused to
simply mean large volumes of data that are difficult to
manage with existing technologies. But this definition is
imprecise. It is more useful to view big data from the
lens of the infamous 3 V’s of big data proposed cleverly
by Gartner’s Doug Laney [8]: volume – amount of data;
velocity – speed at which the data arrives and how long
it stays relevant; and variety – incompatible data formats
and non-aligned data structures. Big data operations
present substantial challenges stemming from the 3 V’s
and require a tight coordination of various activities,
including: data ingestion and storage technologies; data
management methods; enterprise data architecture; data
cleansing and validation; and data access and
ownership, among other things. Prior studies have
shown how easy it is to collect redundant or inconsistent
data [9]. We posit that in order for big data to be
effective, it not only needs to be effectively managed,
but the appropriate coordination and governance
mechanisms need to be in place and aligned with the
strategic goals of the organization.
Analytics – The Institute for Operations Research and
Management Sciences (INFORMS), which is the
leading professional and academic organization in the
analytics community, defines analytics as “the scientific
process of transforming data into insight for making
better decisions” – see https://www.informs.org/About-
INFORMS/What-is-Analytics. Not all analytics are
conducted in big data environments. On the contrary,
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many companies either continue to manage their
corporate data using traditional database technologies,
or have data warehouses where the big data can be
downloaded and structured for further analysis. The
McKinsey Global Institute’s infamous study in 2011
claims that the US faces a talent shortage of 140,000 to
190,000 professionals with deep analytical skills, and
about 1.5 million managers and decision makers with
analytics skills [10]. Once again, reports like these have
created an analytics education and hiring frenzy and data
scientists is now considered the “sexiest” profession
[11]. The problem with this data science explosion is
that there is a lot of variance in what students learn about
analytics today and how organizations do analytics,
ranging from a stove piped approached led by one or a
few talented data scientists, to a more organized
approach matching the strategic needs of the
organization. We posit that in order for analytics to be
effective, it is necessary but insufficient to have
analytical talent and effective tools, and it is also
necessary to have the appropriate coordination and
government mechanisms in place, aligned with the
strategic goals of the organization.
Big Data Analytics – While we use BDA in this paper
as a catch all term to include all big data and analytics
activity, BDA has a very specific meaning and it refers
to doing the analytics work directly in the big data
environment. This, of course, requires more technical
talent and programming skills. Most organizations that
engage in BDA need to analyze the data in real time and
often have software applications to run automated
predictive models. For the purposes of this research on
BDA coordination and governance, the arguments we
made previously about big data and analytics hold for
BDA also. Therefore, we posit that in order for BDA to
be effective, the appropriate coordination and
governance mechanisms need to be in place and aligned
with the strategic goals of the organization.
The BDA Life Cycle – Analytics projects follow a well-
defined life cycle, which includes: (1) analytic problem
– the identification and formulation of a relevant
analytics question to answer, which requires sound
knowledge of the functional domain of analysis; (2) data
work – identification, gathering, manipulation, pre-
processing and preparation of the necessary internal and
external data for analysis; (3) modeling decisions –
selecting the appropriate collection of modeling
methods for the analysis; (4) analysis – conducting the
actual analysis; and (5) reporting – articulation of key
results from the analysis. In this study we argue that in
order for BDA to be successful, all related activities
need to be effectively coordinated.
3. Coordination Theory
BDA is a multi-discipline team-based activity that
brings together various perspectives, including:
technical, quantitative, analytical, functional and
strategic. Naturally, this will require agreement and
coordinated action among many people and
organizational units. As such, the process will be replete
with dependencies, which will need to be managed
effectively, thus the importance of incorporating
coordination theory into our research framework. In the
next subsections we discuss the basic concepts behind
coordination theory. In later sections we integrate this
theory into our framework.
3.1 Foundations
Coordination theory defines coordination as “the
management of dependencies among task activities”
[12]. This definition is very useful because it implies
that if task activities can be carried out independently,
then coordination is less necessary or not necessary at
all for collective performance. Malone and colleagues
[7] extended this concept in a more interdisciplinary
way by arguing that dependencies exist, not only among
people, but also among processes and resources. For
example, the work of a data scientist not only depends
on the work done by functional workers (e.g., marketers,
financial analyst), but also on the technology, tools and
methods employed to manage data and do the analytical
work.
To better understand the nature of these
dependencies it helps to think in terms of the topology
of dependencies formulated by Thomson [13], which
includes, in increasing order of complexity: (1)
independence—i.e., task activities can be carried out
individually without coordination; (2) pooled
dependency—i.e., task activities can still be carried out
individually, but depend on and compete for the same
pool of resources (e.g., shared budget, equipment,
people); (3) sequential dependency—i.e., one task
activity depends on another, but not the other way
around, thus only the dependent activity needs to be
coordinated; and (4) reciprocal dependency or
interdependency—i.e., both activities are dependent on
each other, thus requiring tighter coordination.
One other distinction that is important to make is
that the term “coordination” can have dual
interpretation, depending on whether one is referring to
the process of coordinating—i.e., managing
dependencies—or coordination outcomes—i.e., extent
to which an activity was effectively coordinated. For
example, when colleagues communicate about the
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analytical task they are coordinating—a process. In
contrast, when management finds a strong alignment
between a particular analytic recommendation and the
associated functional goals, the work can be said to have
been successfully coordinated—an outcome. We now
discuss coordination processes and outcomes in more
detail.
3.2 Coordination Processes
The process of coordinating is an old problem in the
classic organizational literature. March and Simon
discussed coordination processes in detail way back in
the 1950’s [14] and argued that coordination can be
accomplished “mechanistically” or “organically”.
x Mechanistic coordination, also referred to as task
programming or coordination by plan [13-15] is
useful for task activities that are more routine and,
therefore, can be more easily programmed. The
implementation and use of mechanisms like
schedules, specifications, plans, and procedures. It is
important to note that we view some aspects of
governance as the formal rules for BDA activity and,
therefore, a form of mechanistic coordination.
Because of its importance, we discuss governance in
more detail in a dedicated section below.
x Organic coordination, also referred to as coordination
through communication, by feedback or by mutual
adjustment [13-15] is more effective with uncertain
and non-routine task activities that cannot be
coordinated mechanistically because conditions are
often changing. This communication can take place in
a number of ways, including informal and
spontaneous interaction, formal and planned [16, 17],
interpersonal or group interaction [15], and verbal or
non-verbal interaction. Organic and mechanistic
coordination are often referred to as “behavioral”
coordination because they are based on what people
“do” to coordinate. However, people can also
coordinate “cognitively” based on the alignment
knowledge and mental schemes. We discuss this next.
x Cognitive coordination, also referred to as implicit
coordination, is based on collective or shared
knowledge that colleagues have about one another
and about each other’s tasks [18-20], allowing them
to coordinate their work based on spoken assumptions
about what others are likely to do [21]. Team
cognition research suggests that when members of a
group share knowledge about each other’s task
activities they can better plan their own activities in
coordination with the activities of others. Similarly,
when collaborators have knowledge about each other
 they can anticipate each other’s actions more
accurately and locate and access expertise more
effectively.
Implicit coordination through shared cognition
comes in different flavors, but they are all based on
some knowledge overlap among collaborators,
including: shared task knowledge – the knowledge
that collaborators have about each other’s tasks [20];
shared mental models or shared schemas – the
alignment, similarity or overlap of individual
members’ knowledge connections and mental
schemas [22] about the task and their peers [23, 24]
(e.g., shared vision, buy-in, etc.); common ground –
mutual knowledge [25, 26] about the meaning of
terminologies and shared vocabulary used [27]; and
collective mind or collective sense making [28], a
most powerful form of group cognition for
coordination purposes because it requires “heedful
interrelating” so that individuals understand and take
into account how their actions will affect others in the
group.
3.2.1 Empirical Evidence
Prior studies of coordination in large scale technical
collaboration has found that in long-term, asynchronous
tasks like enterprise architecting, the role of implicit
coordination is critical to success because it provides the
alignment between architects, IT staff and business
stakeholders [29]. This alignment is the essence of large
complex tasks like enterprise architecture, whose goal is
to provided standards and guidance to develop systems
efficiently, in support of key business processes and the
execution of organizational strategies [30]. Because
BDA is also a long-term, asynchronous, multi-
functional technical task, we posit that such alignment
across the multiple function provided by implicit
coordination is also critical for BDA. These prior
findings, which are based on several case studies, can be
succinctly summarized as follows:
x Organic coordination is prevalent and necessary, but
it is insufficient and, furthermore, too much
communication could be an indicator of problems
within the group.
x Mechanistic coordination is not only necessary, but
it is most effective. It provides rules and procedural
discipline, which helps keep things coordinated.
x Implicit coordination is critical because it not only
influences coordination effectiveness directly, but it
also enhances organic and mechanistic coordination.
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x There is a “self-fueling” dynamic cycle in which
implicit coordination improves coordination
effectiveness, which in turn improves organic and
mechanistic coordination, which in turn makes
implicit coordination stronger, thus creating a cycle.
The most successful organizations were able to
ignite this cycle and achieve continuous
improvement over time.
In sum, we posit that all three forms of coordination
– organic, mechanistic and cognitive – influence BDA
outcomes. We also posit that implicit coordination has a
moderating effect on the effects of organic and
mechanistic coordination on BDA outcomes, such that
these effects are enhanced when implicit coordination is
stronger.
3.3 Coordination Outcomes
Coordination outcomes are the results of
coordination processes. Thus, coordination outcomes
represent the “state” of coordination, which need to be
distinguished from the acts of coordinating employed to
achieve that state. Coordination outcomes are easier to
identify when coordination is lacking because
coordination problems are often very evident. Empirical
studies have shown that there are three primary types of
coordination outcomes in technical tasks [31]: technical
coordination – the various parts of the system work well
together; temporal coordination – when the timely
completion schedules of the various project component
don’t interfere with the completion schedules of other
components; and process coordination – when the
established process for carrying out projects is adhered
to (e.g., no priority conflicts, no incompatibility in
approaches, no issues that require escalation, etc.).
Because BDA is not just a technical task, but one that
involves quantitative knowledge work and functional
domain analysis, we need to map these outcomes more
closely to BDA activity. In this research, we propose to
do this mapping as follows:
x Technical coordination – technology infrastructure,
tools and methods are consistent across BDA
problems in multiple domains, such that two similar
problems in different parts of the organization have
similar BDA approaches.
x Temporal coordination – solving analytical problems
or answering analytics questions are time sensitive,
particularly in tight competitive environments. The
various stages of the analytics life cycle described
above need to be conducted in a timely manner such
that the analytics report is delivered in time to have an
impact.
x Process coordination – as with other technical tasks,
process coordination is about adhering to the
established BDA process, such that there are no
conflicts of interest, re-work or hot escalation issues
resulting from the BDA work of the multiple people
involved. One important aspect of process
coordination is the alignment between the goals of the
BDA activity with the goals of the organization. Any
BDA activity that does not contribute to the
organizational goals is out of alignment and can be
viewed as wasteful.
4. BDA Governance Literature Review
Governance has been defined as “the distribution of
IT decision-making rights and responsibilities among
enterprise stakeholders, and the procedures and
mechanisms for making and monitoring strategic
decisions regarding IT” [32, 33]. Consistently, BDA
governance can be thought of as the approach that
analytic based organizations use to define, prioritize and
track analytic initiatives as well as to manage different
types and categories of data related to analytics. BDA
governance represents the rules and controls that
participants must comply with when performing BDA
work. In order to achieve proper coordination and
integration of efforts, organizations must fundamentally
address issues related to IT governance [32-34] and
BDA is no exception. The academic literature on BDA
governance is very limited, which is what motivates this
research. At the same time, there is a fair amount of
academic literature on IT governance and of practitioner
literature on BDA governance. Therefore, we lean on
these two bodies of literature to develop our research
framework.
With respect to the academic literature on IT
governance, Boh and Yellin [32] found that standards,
coupled with the use of governance mechanisms were
beneficial for infrastructure standardization and
business integration in enterprise architecture [33, 35,
36], and stated that prior research on IT governance has
focused mainly on centralization versus decentralization
of IT decision making, but argued that IT governance
goes beyond this, which is particularly relevant for BDA
because it permeates all aspects of business, thus
requiring that we take a broader view of governance
Other studies have also found the importance of
having a governance framework that specified rules and
roles to oversee the use of IT resources and approve
business cases for large IT initiatives was beneficial
[37]. Prior research has also suggested that in addition
to rules, standards and controls, the informal and social
aspects are also important for alignment and integration
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across the various IT activities, suggesting that there are
two dimensions to governance: intellectual – mapping
to the specific governance controls and compliance; and
social – which are important for all parties involved in
BDA to understand and commit to each other’s goals,
objectives and plans [37]. Others have also pointed to
the importance of having both, formal governance along
with more informal processes for collaboration [38].
Tallon [39] also suggests that an effective approach to
corporate governance for big data is one that balances
three perspectives: value creation, risk exposure and
cost. We argue that this is a very effective approach to
conceptualizing BDA governance, but we also argue
that it is the “A” in BDA that drives value creation.
Analytics on big data enables effective prediction and
decision making practices that can translate into profits
and long-term sustainable competitive advantage.
Tallon proposes three practice categories for big data
governance: structural (e.g., data ownership rights,
steering committees, etc.), operational (e.g., data
retention, access rights, data protection, storage and
migration policies, etc.) and relational (e.g, awareness
and education on data practices, communication, etc.).
We complement this view by proposing that these
practices need to be effectively coordinated for BDA to
be effective.
With respect to the practitioner literature, according
to Gartner [40], not having a governance framework for
BDA has substantial risks due to things like: insufficient
use of analytics capabilities; loss of reputation due to
illegitimate or unethical work; incorrect decisions based
on poorly understood models; failure to comply with
regulatory requirements; and low quality or
misalignment of analytics solutions with organizational
needs. In the same report, Gartner suggested the
following attributes of BDA governance: decision
rights; business objectives; investments; policies;
procedures; measures; adherence; and behaviors. The
report also suggested four business objectives BDA
governance supports: (1) preservation and growth of
shareholder value; (2) coherent strategy realization; (3)
compliance and assurance; and (4) risk management.
The first two relate to these BDA governance objectives:
viability, relevance, efficiency, consistency, alignment
and appropriateness. The last two relate to: legitimacy,
integrity, security, privacy, fidelity and quality.
BDA governance can be decomposed into its main
two components: analytics governance (i.e., viability,
relevance, transparency, legitimacy, appropriateness)
and information (or data) governance (i.e., integrity,
fidelity, quality, security, privacy, retention). These
components affect three constituent groups: analytics
producers, analytics consumers and corporate
executives, to which we add one more component
related to big data – data administrators.
Soares [41] also proposed a framework, which
classifies big data governance along three dimensions:
(1) function and industry (e.g., healthcare, retail,
customer service); (2) big data type (e.g., social media,
transactional, machine generated, etc.); and (3)
governance discipline (e.g., organization, metadata, data
quality, business process integration, information life
cycle management, etc.). He also suggested a number of
policy areas that big data governance should cover,
including: data ownership, organization, data
architecture and modeling, data and metadata
management, data quality, and data security, among
others. When we incorporate the term “analytics” into
BDA, we also need to consider governance policies for
things like analytical methods, tools, processes,
production and dissemination of analytics report, among
other things. And because BDA can only occur if the
processes are designed and implemented to capture and
produce the necessary data for BDA, policies must
include business process practices that support the
generation and availability of these data [41].
Finally, recent studies of governance in enterprise
architecture have found that governance can be
proactive, post-hoc or ad-hoc [29]. Proactive
governance is about establishing effective controls and
working in advance to implement practices to enhance
the effectiveness of practices and reduce the likelihood
of encountering non-compliance issues, which is a most
effective mechanistic coordination practice. Post-hoc is
mostly about compliance review, which is often viewed
as a compliance issue and as a nuisance and an
impediment, and therefore least effective for
coordination. Ad-hoc governance is the least effective
and even detrimental because there is really no
governance plan in place.
In sum, BDA is about establishing and following
the rules of BDA work, which is often referred to
respectively as control and compliance. Control is about
establishing the governance rules and compliance is
ensuring the adherence to these rules. But establishing
controls is like establishing mechanistic coordination
plans and ensuring compliance is about evaluating if
such plans were followed. Overall, we conclude that we
cannot divorce governance from coordination. On the
contrary, governance controls and compliance are an
important aspect of coordination. As Tallon suggested,
BDA governance is important, but to be effective it
needs to carefully balance value creation, risk exposure
and operational costs.
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Thus, as with other forms of behavioral
coordination, we posit that BDA governance influences
BDA outcomes. We also posit that implicit coordination
has a positive moderating effect on the effects of BDA
governance on BDA outcomes, such that this effect is
enhanced when implicit coordination is stronger. We do
not predict self-fueling effects of cognitive coordination
on BDA outcomes because we do not have any
theoretical foundations for how cognitive coordination
may operate in BDA work, but we will explore the
possibility of this effect in our initial qualitative study
discussed in section 7.
5. BDA and Organizational Outcomes
Just about any traditional variable of organizational
success and performance could be used to evaluate the
organizational impact of BDA. Stories about the
organizational benefits of BDA appear in the news and
popular press daily and we constantly hear about the
success stories. We don’t hear as much about failures or
about less than desirable return on BDA investments.
We argue that in order to understand how BDA
influences organizational outcomes, we need to first
understand what drives BDA outcomes. As we have
argued in prior sections we posit that BDA outcomes
will be more substantial when the BDA effort is
effectively coordinated and governed. Without question,
isolated and stove piped BDA projects can have an
impact, and a few talented individuals can make a big
difference in organizations. But we argue that in order
for these benefits to be sustainable over time and
provide strategic advantage to an organization, the BDA
effort will require coordinated effort and effective
governance.
Again, theorizing about organizational outcomes
from BDA activities is beyond the scope of this
research, but we begin by discussing BDA outcomes
from the perspective of capability maturity models. An
INFORMS survey of 230 participants shows that the
concept of analytics maturity is very important, but most
of these organizations do not have a plan, model or
mechanism to assess analytics maturity [42]. Prior
studies of software engineering have used capability
maturity models like the Software Engineering
Institute’s CMM [43] successfully to characterize the
level of sophistication of software organizations.
Similar models have been developed for enterprise
architecture [30] and other technical endeavors. These
models are very useful because one can study which
coordination processes, governance practices and other
activity lead to higher maturity and sophistication in a
given practice.
 To the best of our knowledge, while a few BDA
maturity models have been proposed, none have been
empirically tested to evaluate how well they
differentiate among the various levels of BDA
proficiency in organizations. We expect that a number
of BDA maturity models will be proposed in the not so
distant future. In fact, some models have already
emerged. For example, INFORMS proposed its own
analytics maturity model [44] based on twelve simple
components organized around three main capabilities:
organizational (i.e., people, leadership, measures and
processes); analytics (i.e., governance, roles/skills,
analytic services and analytic processes); and data and
infrastructure (i.e., health, access, traceability, analytics
architecture). One attractive thing about this maturity
model is that it is organized about key capability areas –
organizational, analytic and infrastructure. However,
this model has not been empirically tested and it requires
further elaboration.
Similarly, Davenport and Harris [1] proposed five
stages of development for analytics capabilities: (1) Pre-
requisites to analytical competition – good transaction
data environment and operations exist at this stage; (2)
Prove-It Detour – most organizations progress to stage
two directly, but some need this detour to prove their
analytical capabilities; (3) Analytical Aspirations – this
stage occurs when analytics gains executive support and
first major analytics projects are launched; (4)
Analytical Company – this stage is achieved when the
organization has world-class analytical capabilities at
the enterprise level; and (5) Analytical Competitors –
which happens when analytics go beyond being a
capability to become strategic for competitive
advantage. Again, this is not exactly a capability
maturity model, but a model outlines phases of
development of analytics sophistication.
Building on Davenport and Harris, Ferris from the
SAS Institute further developed this maturity model [45]
and proposed five stages: (1) Analytically Impaired –
the organization has some data and interest in analytics;
(2) Localized Analytics – some analytics capabilities
and interest in specific functional areas; (3, 4 and 5)
same as Davenport and Harris. Despite the similarities,
Ferris takes the maturity model one step further by
proposing a questionnaire of more than 140 items to
evaluate an organization’s analytical capability along
nine categories: (1) strategy; (2) management support;
(3) culture; (4) technology; (5) data management; (6)
analytics skills and competency; (7) decision making
process; (8) execution; and (9) reporting and
monitoring.
Again, the Ferris model has not been empirically
validated, but it is an appealing model because it ties the
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analytics maturity (AM) model to the information
evolution (IM) maturity of the organization based on
Davis et al.’s Information Revolution [46], placing
organizations in one of four quadrants depending on
their maturity along these two dimensions: I (low AM
and IM); II (low AM, high IM); III (high AM, low IM);
and IV (high AM and IM). Because our goal is to study
the importance of coordination and governance of BDA,
which involves both, information management and
analytics capabilities, this two-dimensional model is the
most suitable for our research.
These stages are a step in the right direction and are
very useful to help evaluate the effectiveness of best
practices, coordination and governance in BDA, but
more work needs to be done to develop an empirically
tested BDA capability maturity model, based on specific
CMM-like key processes and capabilities that are
indicators of the various capability levels. Examples of
possible capabilities or key processes include things
like: data governance; having a chief data officer;
widespread data access; staff trained in analytics and
data science; standardized corporate tools for analysis;
big data storage capabilities; programming staff; having
an analytics department with key roles fully staffed;
having functional domain experts available to the
analytics team; and so on. The formulation of a big data
analytics capability maturity model is beyond the scope
of this chapter, but we hope that this discussion
illustrates the importance of developing one.
6. Research Agenda
The discussion we have presented above leads us to
formulate the research framework depicted in Figure 1.
This model is partly based on prior findings about
coordination and governance in enterprise architecture,
discussed above, modified to fit the nuances of BDA
work. We argue that this empirically-tested model
extends to the BDA activity because both, enterprise
architecting and BDA their multiple similarities,
including: multi-disciplinary activity; long-term task;
the work is done mostly asynchronously; multi-
disciplinarily work; with potential strategic benefits to
the organization; and requiring tight alignment across
the various technical and business groups involved in
BDA.
We propose the research model depicted in Figure
1 to guide our inquiry with an exploratory study. In this
model we posit that organic and mechanistic
coordination influence BDA outcomes. We also posit
that BDA governance, acting as a mechanistic
coordination activity, also influences BDA outcomes.
We also posit that cognitive coordination has a main
effect on BDA outcomes because it helps align shared
goals and mindsets in one direction. We also posit a
positive moderating effect on the effect of organic and
mechanistic coordination and BDA governance, such
that cognitive cognition makes both, organic and
mechanistic coordination more effective. In contrast to
prior findings about self-fueling effect in enterprise
architecting, we do not argue for a self-fueling effect of
cognitive coordination on BDA outcomes, but suspect
that one may exist and will keep an open mind about this
possibility. Finally, the effects of BDA capabilities on
BDA outcomes and the effects of BDA outcomes on
organizational outcomes are outside the scope of this
research, but they are both included in the research
model for completeness. As articulated by the various
proponents of BDA maturity models, BDA capabilities
will positively influence BDA outcomes. Similarly,
stronger BDA outcomes will lead to better
organizational outcomes.
The research framework presented in Figure 1 is
intentionally parsimonious because it is intended to
guide our qualitative inquiry on coordination and
governance in BDA. Our future research plans has two
phases: (1) a qualitative study; followed by a (2) survey
study.
6.1 Research Methods for Next Phases
6.2.1 Next Phase – Qualitative Study
Because we know so little about coordination and
governance in BDA, we plan to start our research with a
qualitative interview study. The study will be based on
semi-structured interviews following a Grounded
Theory approach [47]. Grounded Theory is ideal for this
Analytics
Maturity
BDA
Governance
Coordination
Processes
(Organic &
Mechanistic)
Cognitive
Coordination
(Technology, Tools,
Methods, Talent)
Figure 1: Research Framework for BDA Coordination and Governance
1119
initial exploratory study because it will allow us to
discover similarities and differences in BDA practices
and approaches to coordination and governance, which
will help us further refine the research framework for the
subsequent survey study. Grounded Theory can provide
rich descriptions of the phenomena observed [47, 48].
Grounded Theory has been widely as a qualitative
method in information systems research [49, 50],
particularly when the study is exploratory, and the
theoretical development of the topic is in its early stages
[50].
Our target sample population is composed of
multiple organizations in various sectors (e.g. private,
government, institutional, etc.) with various levels of
BDA maturity (per Ferris’ five stages of development).
For each organization in a sample, we plan to interview:
a business executive; a chief data officer or equivalent;
a data administrator; a data scientist or analyst; and one
or two functional domain experts, depending on the size
of the organization. Each interview will be first
transcribed verbatim and then analyzed as prescribed by
Grounded Theory using open coding to uncover
recurring themes surfacing from participant accounts.
We will continue conducting interviews until theoretical
saturation is achieved (i.e., nothing new is learned from
subsequent interviews). We will then do axial coding of
the interviews to uncover relationships among themes of
interest to our study. We will then do theoretical
sampling to reconcile our findings with the extant
literature. In addition to uncovering themes associated
with BDA coordination and governance, we hope to
obtain more nuanced insights into what makes up a
mature BDA organization, so our interview instruments
will have questions aimed at discovering key processes
Information
Evolution
Maturity
BDA Organizational
Outcomes Outcomes
BDA
Capabilities
and capabilities that are good indicators of strong BDA
capability.
6.2.2 Subsequent Phase – Survey Study Once we
complete the qualitative study we plan to launch a
survey study. We plan to use the qualitative study
findings and the extant literature to construct the study
variables to help us test the revised version of the model
presented in Figure 1. For the survey study we plan to
collect data from multiple organizations with
participants with similar roles to the ones utilized for the
qualitative study above.
7. Discussion
Our proposed research framework is by no means
complete, but we hope that it will spark much needed
discussion in this area. This framework has limitations
because it has not been validated empirically and
because it only incorporates distance and time
boundaries. Further research is necessary to expand our
framework to include other global boundaries. Despite
this limitation, our proposed framework is soundly
grounded on well-established bodies of research—i.e.,
BDA, coordination theory, IS governance research and
organizational outcomes. This framework is a first step
to providing theoretical foundations for studies in this
area. Our goal in this next phase of our research is to
discover the main coordination and governance
challenges confronted in BDA work and develop a more
nuanced understanding of the key challenges in this
work and the best practices to mitigate these challenges.
We will use these findings to further refine and validate
our research model in Figure 1, so that we can conduct
a more targeted survey study afterwards.
Our study will provide an important theoretical
contribution to BDA coordination and governance
because of the very sparse work in this area. It will also
provide important practical implications for managers to
improve their BDA practices through effective
coordination and governance.
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