The Making of Data Commodities: Data Analytics as an Embedded Process

This paper studies the process by which data are generated, managed, and assembled into tradable objects we call data commodities. We link the making of such objects to the open and editable nature of digital data and to the emerging big data industry in which they are diffused items of exchange, re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of management information systems Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 401 - 429
Main Authors: Aaltonen, Aleksi, Alaimo, Cristina, Kallinikos, Jannis
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Abingdon Routledge 03.04.2021
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects:
Advertisements
Advertising
Advertising audience
Aggregate data
Big Data
Building management
case study
Commodities
Data analysis
data analytics
data commodities
Data management
data-based objects
Digital data
Information systems
Information technology
Infrastructure
social practices
Telecommunications
Telecommunications industry
ISSN:0742-1222, 1557-928X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper studies the process by which data are generated, managed, and assembled into tradable objects we call data commodities. We link the making of such objects to the open and editable nature of digital data and to the emerging big data industry in which they are diffused items of exchange, repurposing, and aggregation. We empirically investigate the making of data commodities in the context of an innovative telecommunications operator, analyzing its efforts to produce advertising audiences by repurposing data from the network infrastructure. The analysis unpacks the processes by which data are repurposed and aggregated into novel data-based objects that acquire organizational and industry relevance through carefully maintained metrics and practices of data management and interpretation. Building from our findings, we develop a process theory that explains the transformations data undergo on their way to becoming commodities and shows how these transformations are related to organizational practices and to the editable, portable, and recontextualizable attributes of data. The theory complements the standard picture of data encountered in data science and analytics, and renews and extends the promise of a constructivist Information Systems (IS) research into the age of datafication. The results provide practitioners, regulators included, vital insights concerning data management practices that produce commodities from data.
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ISSN:0742-1222
1557-928X
DOI:10.1080/07421222.2021.1912928