Critical Success Factors for Big Data: A Systematic Literature Review

During the last few decades, many organizations have started recognizing the benefits of Big Data (BD) to drive their digital transformation and to gain faster insights from faster data. Making smart data-driven decisions will help the organizations to ride the waves toward invaluable investments. The successful implementation of Big Data projects depends on their alignment with the current organizational, technological, and analytical aspects. Identifying the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for Big Data is fundamental to overcome the challenges surrounding Big Data Analytics (BDA) and implementation. In recent years, the investigations related to identifying the CSFs of Big Data and Big Data Analytics expanded on a large scale trying to address the limitations in existing publications and contribute to the body of knowledge. This paper aims to provide more understanding about the existing CSFs for Big Data Analytics and implementation and contributes to the body of knowledge by answering three research questions: 1) How many studies have investigated on Big Data CSFs for analytics and implementation?, 2) What are the existing CSFs for Big Data Analytics, and 3) What are the categories of Big Data Analytics CSFs?. By conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) for the available studies related to Big Data CSFs in the last twelve years (2007-2019), a final list of sixteen (16) related articles was extracted and analyzed to identify the Big Data Analytics CSFs and their categories. Based on the descriptive qualitative content analysis method for the selected literature, this SLR paper identifies 74 CSFs for Big Data and proposes a classification schema and framework in terms of 5 categories, namely Organization, Technology, People, Data Management, and Governance. The findings of this paper could be used as a referential framework for a successful strategy and implementation of Big Data by formulating more effective data-driven decisions. Future work will investigate the priority of the Big Data CSFs and their categories toward developing a conceptual framework for assessing the success of Big Data projects.