Tracing technology framing and overflowing processes: do big data constraints turn into opportunities?

Given the ever-increasing use of information systems by companies from all production sectors, this study explores the process of adopting a big data technology, and the related problems and challenges that arise, in a Tuscan service company of leather supply chain. Adopting Callon's performativity theory (2007; 1998a) combined with the assumptions of Ceruti's studies (Bocchi and Ceruti, 1981; Ceruti, 1986; Ceruti and Preta, 1990), this thesis empirically investigates the role played by the big data technology in stabilizing but also diversifying business actions and processes, also focusing on the challenges and problems generated by the technology and their creative function in developing new knowledge and changes. In doing that, the analysis will be carried out retracing the continuous cycle of framing-overflowing-reframing related to big data technology adoption and use. This thesis makes the following contributions. Firstly, it contributes to shed lights on the black boxed process of big data technology adoption, focusing the analysis on the key challenges and problems that big data induced in the organization (such as big data collection and interpretation). Secondly, this study deepens the creative function of the overflowing, that becomes a constitutive moment since it made possible the transformation of the ‘big data constraint’ into ‘an opportunity for new possibilities’. In fact, the study demonstrates how the source of new knowledge and changes is not given by the stabilizing role of big data technology during the framing processes but is given by the overflowing that such technological device produced, thus by what big data analytics fail to categorize. Thirdly, participation, dialogue and cross-functional communications activities inside the company have proved to be decisive factors in overcoming the challenges posed by the big data technology. In this scenario, the analytics, besides being a ‘space for calculability’ to frame business actions and behaviour, has also performed the function of a platform of communicative actions and mediations among different business actors. Lastly, the case study shows the effects that big data technology can have on the decision-making processes, which change from intuition-based to a data-driven approach, and on the ‘culture of control’ of business processes, which from occasional became real-time and continuous.