The mediating role of big data analytics in enhancing firms’ commitment to sustainability

Abstract

Big data is one of these attractive phrases that is used everywhere nowadays. It is considered to be the driving force behind the digital revolution that companies are currently leading. According to IBM [1], the amount of data that was created by 2020 is mind-boggling as it is 300 times more than the number of bytes that were available in 2005, just 14 years ago. Reference [2] was not overemphasising data when he compared its impacts on this era to the impacts of oil on industries during the last century.Companies nowadays have all the possibilities to integrate this technology during their digital transformation journeys. As data is considered to be the fuel of the economy in the digital era, embracing this digital capability becomes necessary to survive in this volatile climate.We are moving past the days when top management waived control of data to IT department. Data should be at the heart of any business strategy. *Author for correspondence Discussions nowadays focus on how companies can monetize data collected from their customers, products and operations by combining it with cutting-edge technologies (advanced analytics, deep learning…) to both enhance their business processes and pivot their business models [3].Potentials of big data are endless. If its impacts on firms' financial numbers are universally recognized, studies that link this technology to social and environmental efforts are still scant. In fact, data analytics could be "the secret ingredient" that companies are looking to own in order to differentiate brand image and to reach sustainability (a mindset that looks for an equilibrium between economy, society and environment) in this era.That said, this paper presents a pure quantitative study that tries to prove the impacts of big data analytics on firms' commitment to sustainability. 41 Moroccan companies from different industries were the object of an empirical investigation. The gathered data were used to validate our proposed research model which highlights the mediating role of business data analytics regarding the quest for sustainability.

Advancements in big data clustering: methods, applications, and insights

“…Clustering, as a subdomain of unsupervised machine learning, entails the grouping of data points into clusters or categories based on shared characteristics, thereby allowing for the exploration of latent patterns and the identification of homogeneous subsets within the data [8][9][10]. This fundamental process has found applications across diverse domains, including but not limited to marketing, healthcare, finance, and scientific research [11,12]. Its importance has been further accentuated with the advent of big data, where traditional data processing techniques prove inadequate in the face of sheer volume, velocity, and variety [13][14][15][16][17].…”