Big Data Adoption in Project Management: Insights From French Organizations

Big data have the potential to revolutionize the project management, but it is not clear how. Despite the growing interest, there is a paucity of exploratory research to assess the practice and the impact of big data tools and technologies on project management approaches and practices. To address this gap, in this article, we initially embrace the technological–organizational–environmental (TOE) framework as the research basis for the adoption process and conducts in-depth interviews with project managers from French organizations in different sectors. The synthesis of interviews reveals that many organizations are still in the early stage of the adoption process, mainly due to a lack of resources, especially expertise. Besides the factors of the three contexts of TOE, the project-level factors are also found to be critical for the adoption of big data in project management. Most of them adopted big data solutions to support them in the conception, definition, and execution phases of project management. Drawing on the findings, this article also provides guidelines to broaden the understanding of big data applications and their role in project management. Based on these results, we present a model with testable propositions and discuss insights that arise for organizations and project managers regarding how to apply big data tools and technologies to create value and overcome the related challenges.

I. Introduction

As The use and application of big data tools¹

In this article, big data are defined as datasets in such a large scale that typical tools and software cannot store, manage, and analyze it as before. The big data come in various forms (structured and unstructured) from various sources and requires a fast-real-time analysis. Broadly, big data technologies include distributed file systems (Hadoop MapReduce framework), NoSQL, MPP systems, cloud computing platforms (storage and computing resources), in-memory database processing, and data mining tools [17], [40], [65].

are introduced in many industries, so do opportunities for businesses to revolutionize the way they operate [10], [30], and eventually, they improve firms’ productivity [3], [16]. Thousands of big data tools and technologies have emerged to perform various tasks and processes to enable businesses to glean insights at a relatively low cost. By adopting big data solutions, organizations can generate both social and economic values [44]. These tools have been changing the established ideas on management practices [65] and presenting the potential for innovative products, services, and insights [29]. Eventually, big data become a part of the core business and operational functions by monitoring the operations in real time, optimizing the supply chain, selecting the right resources, increasing sales, and customer satisfaction [23], [28], [33].