Most organisations collect more data than they know what to do with. The problem is not a shortage of analytics tools; it is a shortage of strategic clarity about how those tools connect to the business.
This paper, led by Syed Tahir Abbas and published in the British Journal of Management, investigates why some organisations extract real competitive value from Big Data Analytics while others do not. The research team surveyed 207 matched pairs of business and IT executives from the same organisations, a design choice that gave rare visibility into whether both sides of the leadership team were actually aligned or just assumed they were.
The core finding is that Big Data Analytics creates organisational value through a specific mechanism: strategic integration. When business and IT leaders are genuinely working to the same agenda, analytics investment flows into two kinds of capability. The first is operational: better process coordination, faster internal decisions, and more efficient use of resources. The second is market-facing: the ability to read demand shifts, track competitor moves, and adapt the organisation’s positioning in response.
Neither capability emerges reliably from data investment alone. The research shows that alignment between business and IT strategy is the critical catalyst. Without it, even sophisticated analytics infrastructure produces fragmented insight that does not translate into performance gains.
The takeaway for practitioners is concrete: analytics leadership cannot live only in the technology function. The value is unlocked when data strategy becomes part of the whole executive conversation, not a technical sub-agenda handed off to the CIO.
Reference: Syed, T. A., Bhatti, Z. A., Clifft, S., Siraj, S., Pahuja, A. and Nawaz, R. (2025). Strategic Alignment of Big Data Analytics: Leveraging Operational and Market Capabilities for Organisational Performance. British Journal of Management. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.70014