Abstract
The South African small- and medium-sized enterprise sector continues to face many
management challenges that often obscure their efficient operations. Many small- and
medium-sized enterprises owner and managers have reported experiencing hardships in
appropriately leveraging business data, its storage, cleaning, and most importantly, its
analysis in ways that optimally meet small- and medium-sized enterprises’ objectives. While
the use of big data analytics largely remains the preserve of big businesses, a few innovative
South African small- and medium-sized enterprises have realised this advantage, and are
now keen to take advantage of big data analytics to serve their own needs. However, the
extent to which this is being achieved, or the primary reasons why big data analytics is used
by small- and medium-sized enterprises is relatively unknown. This research carried out an
exploratory study in the South African context and explored reasons prevalent in the South
African context that drive the uptake of big data analytics by small- and medium-sized
enterprises in an effort to manage their information security needs. A foundational literature
review was carried out. The study focused on Johannesburg, in the Gauteng province of South
Africa, and used the grounded theory method to elicit rich qualitative data from 25 smalland
medium-sized enterprise owner-managers and data scientists in an effort to develop a
substantive theory that would help predict the uptake of big data analytics to assist in efforts,
such as information security. A purely qualitative approach was adopted and the grounded
theory method was used. Additionally, the literature review, data collection, coding, and
interpretation were carried out iteratively while avoiding interpretive biases, with the aim
of developing a substantive theory. The theory that resulted from this research shows that
ability, opportunity, motivation, and information security are core categories that generally
predict small- and medium-sized businesses’ big data uptake. This substantive theory was
judged against Glaser’s two criteria of ensuring substantive theoretical validity and was
considered to meet both criteria. The process of theory generation and important theoretical
implications are explained in the penultimate sections. The research concludes with shortand
long-term action, along with recommendations and suggested contributions this
substantive theory offers to researchers and small- and medium-sized business owners and
managers.
Keywords: Big data analytics, information security, grounded theory, small business.