Big data maturity model for Malaysian zakat institutions to embark on big data initiatives

Organizations worldwide are dealing with immense growth of data at a huge speed hence making it difficult to manage. The main difficulty in handling such large amount of data is due to the five big data concepts involving volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value which increases rapidly in comparison to the computing resources. One of the arms of the government which holds the responsibility of managing the almsgiving or zakat is currently facing similar issues with the growing amount of data on zakat payers, zakat distribution and various zakat recipients. The overwhelming amount of data must be carefully managed by the zakat institution and the appointed zakat fund trustee. Zakat data resides in massive, unstructured information, largely in various forms of numeric, text and imagery. Hence, there exist a need for zakat institutions to have better data management mechanism namely to coordinate and govern data between the zakat institution and zakat fund trustee offices. This study proposes a big data maturity model to gauge the readiness of zakat institutions to embark into the big data evolution. The proposed model also aims to provide the zakat institution with more structured processes of managing the high volume of data in order to provide better reporting transparency, making well-informed decisions and instill better trust from the Islamic community on better zakat management and distribution.