Big Data for Digital Transformation of Public Services

Introduction

Digital enterprise transformation may be defined as end-to-end value creation for the enterprise via management and application of digital technology aligned with business strategy. Big data is presently considered integral to the management and strategies for digital enterprise transformation. However, it is not entirely a new term. In the context of data and storage management, the term Big data was already in use in computing circles (e.g. Bourgoin & Smith, 1995; Mashey, 1997) even before the dawn of the new millennium. However, the term became well-known at the start of the decade when popular business research outlets such as McKinsey Global Institute (Brown, Chui, & Manyika, 2011) and Harvard Business Review (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2012) started publishing about it. By 2015, Gartner dropped the term from the hype cycle, noting that Big data has become so prevalent that it is now part of multiple emerging technologies (Heudecker, 2015) such as business intelligence, data science, social media analytics, enterprise information management or machine learning. The central role of Big data in digital enterprise transformation reflects in wide availability of technological solutions such as Apache Hadoop, Spark, Microsoft HDInsight, NoSQL, or Hive. In fact, Apache Hadoop has emerged as a best in-class Big data ecosystem, supporting data processing capabilities and system connectivity across heterogeneous databases and systems. However, since the focus of this chapter is on management and strategies for the transformation of digital enterprises, specific technologies are not discussed in this chapter. The interested reader is directed towards some recent works (Luengo, García-Gil, Ramírez-Gallego, García, & Herrera, 2020; Rao, Mitra, Bhatt, & Goswami, 2019) for a discussion on Big data ecosystem, technology and tools.

The key role of Big data in digital enterprise transformation and value creation may be inferred from the fact that KPMG / Harvey Nash CIO survey (2019) identifies Big data analytics as the most important (and the scarcest) skillset required in organizations. Big Data capabilities are found to be an important predictor of value creation and firm performance (Wamba, Gunasekaran, Akter, Ren, Dubey, & Childe, 2017; Mikalef, Boura, Lekakos, & Krogstie, 2019), especially in the private sector. However, the scope of Big data is not just limited to the private sector firms. Big data is frequently noted (Joseph & Johnson, 2013; Gaardboe, Svarre, & Kanstrup, 2015; Patel, Roy, Bhattacharyya, & Kim, 2017; Shukla & Mathur, 2020) as a key element in the management and strategies of digital public service transformation. This chapter explores the potential of Big data in advancing the e-Governance agenda via digital transformation of public services. Hence, the research question for this study is: How does Big data contribute towards the digital transformation of public services?. The research approach is exploratory in nature and thus relies on secondary data and studies. The remainder of the chapter is as follows. The next section provides a general background to Big data and outlines seven Vs that underpin the Big data revolution. This is followed by a discussion on how seven Vs are applicable to Big data in public service. Key application areas from the public service that may be transformed by Big data applications are discussed in detail. Thereafter. challenges and concerns associated with the development of Big data capabilities in the government are also noted. This is followed by offering solutions and recommendations to the problems raised earlier. Future research directions are noted before concluding the chapter.