Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The telecommunications industry generates vast amounts of data on a daily basis. The exponential
growth in this industry has, therefore, increased the amounts of nodes that generates data on a
near real-time basis, and the required processing power to process all this information has
increased as well.
Organisations in different industries have experienced the same growth in information processing,
and, in recent years, professionals in the Information Systems (IS) industry have started referring
to these challenges as the concept of Big Data (BD).
This theoretical research investigated the definition of big data as defined by several leading
players in the industry. The theoretical research further focussed on several key areas relating to
the big data era:
i) Common attributes of big data.
ii) How do organisations respond to big data?
iii) What are the opportunities that big data provide to organisations?
A selecting of case studies are presented to determine what other players in the IS industry does
to exploit big data opportunities.
The study signified that the concept of big data has emerged due to IT infrastructure struggling to
cope with the increased volumes, variety and velocity of data being generated and that
organisations are finding it difficult to incorporate the results from new and advanced mining and
analytical techniques into their operations in order to extract the maximum value from their data.
The study further found that big data impacts each component of the modern day computer based
information system and the exploration of several practical cases further highlighted how different
organisations have addressed this big data phenomenon in their IS environment. Using all this
information, the study investigated the 4C Group business model and identified some key
opportunities for this IT vendor in the big data era.
As the 4C Group has positioned themselves across the ICT value chain, big data presents several
good opportunities to explore in all components of the IS. While training and consulting can
establish the 4C Group as a big data knowledgeable vendor, some enhancements to their
application software functionalities can provide additional big data opportunities. And as true big
data value only originates from the utilization of the data in the daily decision making processes, by offering IaaS the 4C Group can enable their clients to achieve the illusive goal of becoming a data
driven organisation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:sun/oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/97409 |
| Date | 04 1900 |
| Creators | Spence, William MacDonald |
| Contributors | Butler, Martin, Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Graduate School of Business. |
| Publisher | Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | xi, 64 pages |
| Rights | Stellenbosch University |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds