Understanding the Big Data Analytics Deployment Gap: Operationally Leveraging Big Data Analytics Capability for Value Generation in Healthcare
Abstract
Despite the surge of big data analytics (BDA) deployments in healthcare, many organizations still struggle to successfully realize value from their investments. This has resulted in the phenomenon of BDA deployment gap, where relative to the interest and investments in BDA initiatives by the organizations, actual value generated from successful migrations of BDA models from data labs to in-practice environment deployments at the initiative level have been scarce. To leverage the growing repository of big data, organizations are required to develop the ability to collect, store, process, and analyze big data (BD); this process is referred to as big data analytics capability (BDAC) in the literature. However, the underlying assumption that organizations with BDAC will always be able to orchestrate the necessary resources and capabilities to use the information from analytics to generate value largely ignores the operational mechanisms involved in how the information is leveraged. This thesis seeks to address this gap in the literature by investigating how organizations find ways to operationally leverage BDAC to generate value in the context of healthcare and generating a better understanding of the knowledge management practices involved in transforming the information from analytics into BDA-enabled capabilities that can lead to improved operational and clinical outcomes.
This thesis includes three components. First, the constructs involved in the value generation process from BDAC in the general context are identified: BDA resources, BDAC, and value. Second, a systematic literature review (SLR) is conducted to develop the conceptual framework in the healthcare context and identify the possible constituents of the mediating ‘black box’, which serve as the operational mechanisms in the leveraging process of BDAC in generating value. Finally, a multiple case study is presented to empirically validate the presence and explicate the workings of the ‘black box’ presented in the indirect value generation pathway framework via BDA-enabled functioning capability (BDA-eFC), a dual-purpose capability. The study further supplements the BDAC literature by offering a nuanced understanding of the underlying mechanisms of how organizations implement BDA in the healthcare delivery process at a functional level to generate value, and address the BDA deployment gap in the healthcare context.