How Big Data Analytics Enables Service Innovation: Materiality, Affordance, and the Individualization of Service
通过对保险、银行、电信和电商四家企业的多案例研究，构建理论模型解释大数据分析技术如何通过自动化服务和人机协作实践实现服务个性化，对服务创新研究者和实践者有参考价值。
The article reports on an exploratory, multisite case study of four organizations from the insurance, banking, telecommunications, and e-commerce industries that implemented big data analytics (BDA) technologies to provide individualized service to their customers. Grounded in our analysis of these four cases, a theoretical model is developed that explains how the flexible and reprogrammable nature of BDA technologies provides features of sourcing, storage, event recognition and prediction, behavior recognition and prediction, rule-based actions, and visualization that afford (1) service automation and (2) BDA-enabled human-material service practices. The model highlights how material agency (in the case of service automation) and the interplay of human and material agencies (in the case of human-material service practices) enable service individualization, as organizations draw on a service-dominant logic. The article contributes to the literature on digitally enabled service innovation by highlighting how BDA technologies are generative digital technologies that provide a key organizational resource for service innovation. We discuss implications for research and practice.