The barriers to big data adoption in developing economies

Big data adoption (BDA) and its barriers, opportunities, and expected benefits are increasingly attracting researchers' and practitioners' attention. For developing economies, BDA has special importance; however, they have struggled to identify the barriers hindering it. This study aims to identify the barriers to BDA in developing economies and their relative importance across sectors to identify sectors' readiness for BDA. Based on a review of the BDA literature, semi-structured interviews with big data (BD) experts, and a questionnaire-based survey, five barrier sets, and 19 sub-barriers were identified. Thereafter, barrier sets for each sector were identified, analyzed, discussed, and compared. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used to identify the relative importance of these barriers across sectors, while the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) was used to rank sectors according to their readiness for BDA. This study positions itself as a reference for scholars and practitioners interested in BDA in developing economies.