Influence Of Big Data Analytics On Operational Agility Of Selected State Entities In Kenya

Abstract

Big data technologies assist companies to effectively fathom their markets and retain their created opportunities by obtaining plentiful data. Various firms resources related to big data should be well understood in order to know how the companies can create value intensify agility and eventually improve the general performance by using the big data analytics. The study had the three objectives including determining the effect of people capabilities, task capabilities and data capabilities of big data analytics on operational agility of selected state-owned entities in Kenya. The theories selected to support the study were the Resource Based Theory of Competitive Advantage and the Schumpeterian‟s innovation model. The study used purposive sampling, targeting a sample of 139 participants, and had a response rate of 64.7%, representing a sample size of 90 respondents distributed among the Huduma Centres within the Nairobi Metropolitan region. The study used SPSS for data analysis, narrowing to inferential analysis and linear regression for establishing correlation between the variables. The findings were that 80.0% and 65.0% agreed that big data analytics was associated with informed operational strategies and enhanced decision-making respectively. From the regression analysis, it was found that all the three variables (people- p-value of 0.036; task- p-value of 0.025; and data capabilities- p-value of 0.042) significantly influenced operational agility as their p-values were below the alpha value of 0.05 (at 95.0% confidence level). Recommendations include encouraging large governmental institutions to embrace big data analytics (BDA) to improve operational agility, and instituting BDA to aid in decision-making, execution and measuring of tasks, and for providing operational strategies based on data analytics outcomes.