Big Data Project Success - a Meta Analysis

The past ten years has delivered breath-taking advances in technology. The vision of an ‘intelligent’, ‘instrumented’ and ‘interconnected’ world is emerging. This frenetic activity is leaving a huge vapour trail of data. So much data is generated and collected today traditional enterprise repositories are currently challenged and the trailblazers of this new revolution had to develop new ways to store and analyse it. The dawn of ‘Big Data’ has arrived. Although much has been written about different types of definitions and the benefits of Big Data; very little has thus far been published on how to succeed with Big Data. This paper reviews this gap and attempts to propose a preliminary set of factors that are critical for success with Big Data. The aim is to identify factors that are critical for a project’s success in this area. In order to identify these factors a number of published case studies from Big Data projects were collected and evaluated produced a preliminary list of factors. This set was further analysed using ABC Analysis to produce six critical success factors. Further research is proposed to validate this set of factors through case studies.