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Big Data and Data Analytics as a means of achieving companies’ competitive advantage

The competition along with the customer expectations have increased a lot in the past years and therefore it is supported that businesses should find more innovative ways in order to increase their profits and remain enough competitive to maintaining their leadership or their brand positioning to themarket. 


One of the most useful ways to achieve this is by collecting, using and correctly interpreting the data that are available to the organization. In this attempt, the contribution of Big Data and Data Analytics can be an invaluable strategic resource for the organization. Exploiting data analytics tools, managers can make more accurate decisions as these decisions would be based on facts, quantitative research and not on suppositions. So, analytics is highly related to the decision-making process and constitutes not only a competitive advantage for the company but a strategic resource as well. Particularly, he expressed the notion that such competitive advantages can stem from the good use of business intelligence and predictive analytics. These tools are also well-implementable to every industry and every sector of the organization, such as marketing, operational department, quality management. 


However, to effectively use analytics, organizations should have Big Data and expertise people who can interpret them. Simultaneously, researchers have shown that companies used data analytics they should have the following characteristics: analytics supported a strategic, distinctive capability; the approach to and management of analytics was enterprise-wide; senior management was committed to the use of analytics, and the company made a significant strategic bet on analytics-based competition. Also, data analytics gives a competitive advantage to companies as data are cheaper to be collected comparing to previous years, there are useful tools that can interpret them without needing to invest a lot of money to infrastructures and there are people that can make this work and find the value that is hidden behind those data. 


For example, Internet of Things (IoT) assists companies to see their customers’ attitudes regarding certain products at a real-time base; hence giving companies the advantage to correspond quickly to customers’ behaviors. Apart from that, analytics can be used as an asset for companies since it provides a great chance for them to make extensive research concerning the market trends and the organizations’ operating activities, something that facilitates organization to see the sales trends, the improvements or the amendments needed to be done inside the organization, as well as the opportunities that emerge to the market. Also, organizations which exploit data analytics are able to innovate in the Market by making significant modifications in their processes or their products/services or by creating entirely new business models. This means that analytical practitioners are basically concentrated on operational improvements and strive to bring about data-driven innovations. Particularly, the most successful companies that used analytics exploit the artificial intelligence technology soas to increase the employees’ skills, save time from “big” projects and help managers to concentrate on the strategic details of the projects rather than involving managers to administrating processes demanded on such projects. Also, through this procedure, companies have the ability to detect and exploit new opportunities concerning their partnerships that can boost their business value chain. Along with this, companies that use data analytics, they increase their access to only useful data; hence saving time and money.


From the analysis above, it became more than apparent that data analytics contribute companies in miscellaneous ways, from resolving strategic issues to providing technological improvements such as cloud computing which ultimately concluded to acquire companies a sustainable competitive advantage. 

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