Reshaping big data management for servitization: a new framework for industrial companies

As a consequence of the exponential growth of the Industry 4.0 technologies, big data combined with increasing processing power, are leading to profound changes for industrial companies. As an example, the spreading of the Internet of Things (IoT), can facilitate to a large extent the servitization of manufacturing firms, i.e. the shift from selling products to offering product-service solutions, where data-driven services are tightly coupled to the product to increase the value potential of this new offering. Despite the acknowledged importance of adopting a specific “big data strategy” in order to exploit the opportunities arising from servitization, how this can be done in practice still remains poorly understood. In fact, few companies have today adopted a structured approach to reshape the way they collect and manage data in order to enable new service offerings and to react to fast changing customers' needs. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a hierarchical framework to describe and operationalize Big Data management to support servitization.