Sustainable Business and Collaboration Driven by Big Data Analytics Amidst the Emergence of the Remote Work Culture

Introduction

Digital transformation has a diverse range of impacts, ranging from industry and societal innovation in both industrial and technological contexts (Gray & Rumpe, 2017). A globally accelerated process of technical adaptation occurs as a result of digitalisation (Westerman, Bonnet, & McAfee, 2014). This chapter concentrates on the shift from a passive information source to a collaborative and intelligent participatory web for a remote work culture. Web 2.0 not only makes information available rapidly, but also influences the speed and volume of information that travels, giving managers tremendous opportunities to interact and communicate with stakeholders almost instantly from not only within the organisation, but also externally through remote work capabilities. In combination with the limited academic insights on big data and social media analytics in a business collaboration and remote work context, the increased volume of data generated and gathered from social networking sites (SNS) creates a relevant point of discussion.

Because nearly every aspect of business and organisational activities has been digitised, businesses have found themselves with large datasets for data analysis. After big data and analytical tools are applied, these datasets yield actionable insights, which can help organisations achieve their business goals, as well as improve their overall performance and create competitive advantage (Wamba et al., 2017). It is therefore possible to consider current sustainability as a corporate performance metric, which is important for organisations, as more stakeholders have the capacity to actively monitor the extent to which organisations pursue and participate in sustainability initiatives. Additionally, there has been a substantial increase in the overall commitment to sustainability in recent decades, mostly due to the increased expectations and requirements placed on organisations by society (Johnson, Redlbacher, & Schaltegger, 2018). Furthermore, it is claimed that corporate sustainability performance is attributable to an organisation's effective stakeholder engagement (Rodriguez-Melo and Mansouri, 2011, p. 548). Collaborative marketing and communications strategy have shifted due to this focus, resulting in an emphasis on stakeholder engagement (Kapitan, Kennedy, & Berth, 2019).

But the focus of academic attention has been on social media from a consumer standpoint, rather than the broader participatory web from this perspective (Michaelidou, Siamagka, & Christodoulides, 2011; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011; Trusov, Bucklin, & Pauwels, 2009). The results of these studies inspired the need to examine if various features of the participatory web, in combination with Big Data and Social Media analytics, can support collaborative business and remote work practice that seek to engage with other firms in supporting sustainability by increasing their profitability. A best practice guideline in the collaborative business context is defined as pursuing business and corporate influence on business and corporate clients to yield trust-based sustainable excellence that, in turn, earns sustainable investments in product and production processes. For example, Sheth and Sinha (2015) mention business to business (B2B) sustainability as a marketing action in which B2B brands take on roles of connecting economic, social, and environmental issues.

While big data analytics is still in its early stages, businesses are using it to gain more transparency, facilitate decisions, and foster collaboration (Waller and Fawcett, 2013, Schoenherr and Cheri, 2015, Hazen et al., 2014, Wang et al., 2016, Kache and Seuring, 2017). It is impossible to ignore the growing impact of big data analytics from a variety of areas, as pointed out by Bughin et al. (2010). However, it is surprising that the majority of the studies focused on the use of big data analytics to benefit environmental and social sustainability lack practical insights (Sivarajah et al., 2017; Bughin et al., 2010; Dubey et al., 2017; Jeble et al., 2018), particularly in remote work contexts. In addition, there is currently a lack of practical insights into the types of techniques that organisations can use to leverage sustainability from their use of big data analytics. For those reasons, this investigation raises the following question: