The Dispersed Materiality of Organizing: A Field-Study of the Practice of Analytics

We present a study of the practice of business analytics in a large retail organization that highlights a number of provocative developments in relation to the notion of comprehensive information and its implications for the nature of organizing. In particular, we explore how ever larger and more diverse sets of data can lead to a dispersion of domains of data storage, manipulation and interpretation such that the concepts of raw data, information system integration, a single source of truth, and the dynamics of who is accountable to whom for what take on new forms that are no longer easily understood in relation to classic framings of the relationship between information and control that have served so well with past waves of technology.