Value of Big Data Analytics for Customs Supervision in e-Commerce

Big data and analytics have received a lot of attention in e-government research over the last decade and practitioners and researchers are looking into the transformative power of this technology to create for example competitive advantage, and increase transparency. Recent research points out that while parties are aware of the transformative power of this technology, understanding the value that this technology can bring for their specific organizations still remains a challenge. Data analytics is in particular interesting to support supervision tasks of governments. Here we take the customs supervision as a typical example where data analytics is used to support government in its supervision role. The main question addressed in this paper is: How to understand the value of big data analytics for government supervision? To address this question this research builds upon a case study where big data analytics solutions are developed and piloted as part of the PROFILE EU-funded research project. We adapt and utilize a recently published integrated model of big data value realization of Gunther et al. [5] as a conceptual lens to structure the case findings. As a result we develop a more detailed model for analyzing value of big data specifically in the context of customs as an example of a specific domain of government supervision. This research contributes to the eGovernment literature on articulating value from big data analytics, particularly focusing on the role of government supervision.