Big Data and Analytics: Why an IT Organization Requires Dedicated Roles to Drive Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Big Data and Analytics have become key concepts within the corporate world, both commercially and from an information technology (IT) perspective. This paper presents the results of a global quantitative analysis of 400 IT leaders from different industries, which examined their attitudes toward dedicated roles for an Information Architect and a Data Scientist. The results illustrate the importance of these roles at the intersection of business and technology. They also show that to build sustainable and quantifiable business results and define an organization's competitive positioning, both roles need to be dedicated, rather than shared across different people. The research also showed that those dedicated roles contribute actively to a sustainable competitive positioning mainly driven by visualization of complex matters.