Big Data Adoption in Project Management: Insights From French Organizations

Big data have the potential to revolutionize the project management, but it is not clear how. Despite the growing interest, there is a paucity of exploratory research to assess the practice and the impact of big data tools and technologies on project management approaches and practices. To address this gap, in this article, we initially embrace the technological–organizational–environmental (TOE) framework as the research basis for the adoption process and conducts in-depth interviews with project managers from French organizations in different sectors. The synthesis of interviews reveals that many organizations are still in the early stage of the adoption process, mainly due to a lack of resources, especially expertise. Besides the factors of the three contexts of TOE, the project-level factors are also found to be critical for the adoption of big data in project management. Most of them adopted big data solutions to support them in the conception, definition, and execution phases of project management. Drawing on the findings, this article also provides guidelines to broaden the understanding of big data applications and their role in project management. Based on these results, we present a model with testable propositions and discuss insights that arise for organizations and project managers regarding how to apply big data tools and technologies to create value and overcome the related challenges.