From Big Data Analytics to Dynamic Capabilities: The Effect of Organizational Inertia

While big data analytics have been credited with being a revolution that will transform the way firms do business, there is still limited knowledge on how they should adopt and diffuse these technologies to support their strategies. The purpose of this paper is to understand how different inertial forces related to deployments of big data analytics inhibit the formation of dynamic capabilities and subsequently performance. We draw on a multiple case study approach of 27 firms to examine the different forms of inertia that characterize big data analytics implementation. This study provides empirical evidence that contributes to the scarce research on deployment of big data analytics to enable dynamic capabilities. Disaggregating dynamic capabilities into the sensing, seizing, and transforming, we find that different forms of inertia including economic, political, socio-cognitive, negative psychology, and socio-technical affect the formation of each type of underlying capability.