The impact of information and communication technology on decision making process in the big data era

Abstract

The information necessary to make important decisions is held by many different hierarchical levels in organizations and management needs to find the answer on the question should the decisions be centralized and made by the top management or decentralized and made by the managers and employees of the lower-level units. This question becomes more important in the big data era which is characterized by volume, velocity, and variety of data. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether information and communication technology leads to centralization or decentralization tendencies in organizations and to give answer on the question what are the new challenges of decision making process in the big data era. The conclusion is that information and communication technology provides all organizational level with information that traditionally was used by only few levels, reducing internal coordination costs and enabling organizations to allow decision making across a higher range of hierarchical levels. But final decision of allocation of decision rights depends on knowledge of employees, especially in the big data era, where professionals with new knowledge and skills (known as data scientist) became of tremendous importance.