Big data systems: knowledge transfer or intelligence insights?

Big data and analytics (BDA) are gaining momentum, particularly in the practitioner world. Research linking BDA to improved organizational performance seems scarce and widely dispersed though, with the majority focused on specific domains and/or macro‐level relationships. In order to synthesize past research and advance knowledge of the potential organizational value of BDA, the authors obtained a data set of 327 primary studies and 1252 secondary cited papers. This paper reviews this body of research, using three bibliometric methods. First, it elucidates its intellectual foundations via co‐citation analysis. Second, it visualizes the historical evolution of BDA and performance research and its substreams through algorithmic historiography. Third, it provides insights into the field's potential evolution via bibliographic coupling. The results reveal that the academic attention for the BDA–performance link has been increasing rapidly. The study uncovered ten research clusters that form the field's foundation. While research seems to have evolved following two main, isolated streams, the past decade has witnessed more cross‐disciplinary collaborations. Moreover, the study identified several research topics undergoing focused development, including financial and customer risk management, text mining and evolutionary algorithms. The review concludes with a discussion of the implications for different functional management domains and the gaps for both research and practice.

Digital transformation (DT) has become a buzzword, triggering different disciplines in research and influencing practice, which leads to independent research streams. Scholars investigate the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of these disruptive technologies by examining the use of single technologies or of digitization, in general. Approaches are often very specialized and restricted to their domains. Thus, the immense breadth of technologies and their possible applications conditions a fragmentation of research, impeding a holistic view. With this systematic literature review, we aim to fill this gap in providing an overview of the different disciplines of DT research from a holistic business perspective. We identified the major research streams and clustered them with co-citation network analysis in nine main areas. Our research shows the main fields of interest in digital transformation research, overlaps of the research areas and fields that are still underrepresented. Within the business research areas, we identified three dominant areas in literature: finance, marketing, and innovation management. However, research streams also arise in terms of single branches like manufacturing or tourism. This study highlights these diverse research streams with the aim of deepening the understanding of digital transformation in research. Yet, research on DT still lacks in the areas of accounting, human resource management, and sustainability. The findings were distilled into a framework of the nine main areas for assisting the implications on potential research gaps on DT from a business perspective.

Resumo Conscientes de la problemática relacionada con la motivación en el estudio de las carreras científicas, presentamos dos experiencias en las cuales se expone a estudiantes universitarios a ambientes, metodologías y técnicas del descubrimiento abordando problemas contemporáneos. Estas experiencias se desarrollaron en dos contextos complementarios: un curso de Introducción a la Física, en el cual se motiva a estudiantes de Física a la participación temprana en investigación, y un semillero de investigación multidisciplinario para estudiantes avanzados de pregrado en Ciencias e Ingeniería, el cual produjo incluso contribuciones a eventos internacionales. Si bien los resultados son preliminares y requieren más ediciones para ser estadísticamente significativos, consideramos que son alentadores. En ambos entornos se observó un aumento de la motivación de los estudiantes para continuar sus carreras haciendo énfasis en la investigación. En este trabajo, además de presentar el marco contextual en el cual se soportan las experiencias, describimos seis actividades concretas para vincular a los estudiantes con los ambientes de descubrimiento, las cuales creemos pueden ser replicadas en ambientes similares de otras instituciones educativas.