Reflections on societal and business model transformation arising from digitization and big data analytics: A research agenda

In the era of accelerating digitization and advanced big data analytics, harnessing quality data for designing and delivering state-of-the-art services will enable innovative business models and management approaches (Boyd and Crawford, 2012; Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014) and yield an array of consequences. Among other consequences, digitization and big data analytics reshape business models and impact employment amongst knowledge workers – just as automation did for manufacturing workers. This Viewpoint paper considers the mechanisms underlying how digitization and big data analytics drive the transformation of business and society and outlines the potential effects of digitization and big data analytics on employment – especially in the context of cognitive tasks. Its aim is to outline a critical research agenda to explore and conceptualize evident changes in business models and society arising from these technological advances. 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Digitization and big data analytics Today, digitization and big data analytics – or ‘datification’ (Galliers et al., 2015; Newell and Marabelli, 2015) – penetrate all areas of life and create new ways of working, communicating and cooperating. Connecting individuals, enterprises, devices and governments enables easier transactions, collaboration and social interaction and results in enormous accessible data sources (Shirky, 2008). Not only do humans turn into ‘‘walking data generators” (McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2012, p. 5) but, in addition, the interaction between objects – the so-called Internet of Things with sensors and IP-addresses – adds a multitude of data sources throughout organizations and society. Computers incorporated into products like cars, vacuum cleaners and video consoles create massive amounts of digitized data and processes. This Viewpoint article focuses on the impact of digitization and big data analytics on business models and employment particularly in the context of cognitive tasks and the resulting societal transformation. This distinguishes our Viewpoint from a number of other recent publications (e.g., Markus, 2015; Newell and Marabelli, 2015; Yoo, 2010) who shed light on the desirable – but also the undesirable – consequences of digitization and big data analytics for individuals and society, and contributes further to the debate called for in Galliers et al. (2015). Digitization originally describes the conversion of analog to digital information and processes in a technical sense (Negroponte, 1995). We, however, are primarily interested in changes of established patterns caused by the digital http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2015.08.002 0963-8687/ 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Journal of Strategic Information Systems 24 (2015) 149–157