A Conceptual Model of the Challenges of Social Media Big Data for Citizen e-Participation: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The emergence of Citizen Relationship Management (CzRM) for government plays a central role in developing citizen relationships and e-participation. As such, the South African government has shown its commitment towards citizenry and the provision of effective service delivery. Social Media Analytics (SMA) has emerged as a potential new solution to support decision-making for service delivery in CzRM. It is believed that the demand for SMA adoption will increasingly rise. However, the reality of social media Big Data comes with the challenges of analysing it in a way that brings Big Value. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges of social media Big Data Analytics (BDA) and to incorporate these in a conceptual model that can be used by governments to support the e-participation of citizens. The model was developed through a systematic literature review (SLR). The findings revealed that data challenges relate to designing an optimal architecture for analysing data that caters for both historic data and real-time data at the same time. The paper highlight that process challenges relate to all the activities in the data lifecycle such as data acquisition and warehousing; data mining and cleaning; data aggregation and integration; analysis and modelling; and data interpretation. The paper also identifies six types of data management challenges: privacy, security, data governance, data and information sharing, cost/operational expenditures, and data ownership.