On the Impact of Big Data Analytics in Decision-Making Processes

We currently live in an era, in which data heavily, constantly, and globally flows into all areas of our activities. This mobile world is based on the concepts of the Internet of Things, which evolved by the digital transformation from Web 2.0 to 4.0, from a people-centric, participative, read-write web to a data-centered, semantic-oriented, and symbiotic web. It connects us at anytime with our conveniences and contacts, feeds our information needs, guides our shopping tendencies, and informs us about businesses and opportunities in a way that otherwise would be difficult to manage, due to the massive amount of data involved. Individuals and mainly organizations have to tackle the problem of how to process large amounts of data in support of their respective needs and operations, aiming at improving their handling and response efficiency. Big Data can be a strategic asset for organizations, but it is only valuable if used constructively and efficiently to deliver appropriate business insights. Moreover, we currently see special needs, like the one with the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 that affected all the world, in which high-level technology and analytics tools for supporting decision-making have proven to be important allied components on the counter-attack and management of the overall crisis. Novel methods and technologies were required to be developed to enable decision-makers to understand and examine the massive, multidimensional, multi-source, time-varying information stream to make effective decisions, sometimes in time-critical situations. The current work evolves from the need and interest of board members of the EURO Working Group on Decision Support Systems EWG-DSS to tackle these emerging issues related to Big Data and Decision-Making. The authors discuss the importance of having appropriate technologies for Decision-Making and Decision Support Systems to exploit the potentiality of Big Data analytics, so that we can treat crisis management in a more effective way; and organizations can improve their productivity to face increased competition in this new era. Our aim is to unveil the main impacts and challenges posed to decision-makers in organizations, in the new era of Big Data availability. An illustrative conceptual model is introduced to support the Big Data Analytics for Decision-Making in cross-domain applications.