A Holistic Framework for Complex Big Data Governance

Big data assets are large datasets that can be leveraged by organisations if the capabilities exist, but it also brings considerable challenges. Despite the benefits that can be realised, the lack of proper big data governance is a major barrier, making the processing and control of this data exceptionally difficult to execute correctly. More specifically, organisations reportedly struggle to incorporate big data governance into their existing structures and business models to derive value from big data initiatives.
Big data governance is an emerging research domain, gaining attention from both Information Systems scholars and the practitioner community. Nonetheless, there appears to have been limited scientific research in the area and most existing data governance approaches were limited, given they do not address end-to-end aspects of how big data could be governed. Furthermore, no suitable framework for handling data governance against big data complexities was found to be available. Thus, the main contribution of the work presented in this thesis is to address this requirement; by advancing research in this field and designing a novel holistic big data governance framework capable of supporting global organisations to effectively manage big data as an asset, thereby obtaining value from their big data initiatives.
An extensive systematic literature review was done in order to uncover the published content that reflects the current state of knowledge in big data governance. To facilitate the creation of the proposed framework a grounded theory methodology was used to analyse openly available parliamentary inquiry data sources, with particular focus on identifying the core criteria for big data governance. The resulting novel framework generated provides new knowledge by identifying several big data governance building blocks; which are classified as strategic goals, execution stages, enablers and 22 core big data governance components to ensure an effective big data governance programme. Moreover, thesis findings indicate that big data complexities extend to the ethical side of big data governance and this is taken into consideration in the framework design. An ‘ethics by design’ component is proposed to influence how this can be addressed in a structured way.