The company introduced BDA to support clinical trials with an in-house-built dashboard and application on operational data. As the technology is still new to the industry, no long-term studies have demonstrated the value of BDA for a company. Traditional key performance metrics are unsuitable for measuring the value since BDA technology is more than just a system or application. Every year, the project team behind the big data dashboard has been asked to show the application’s value but has struggled to do so.

This paper examines the following questions: (1) What are the value-adding factors of BDA in the context of the client? (2) How do users of the application rate the value of using it in their work? (3) What is the overall value the application generates for the client? To answer the questions, scientific articles were analysed in the google scholar database. In addition, semi-qualitative data was collected and analysed through a survey.

A monetary valuation has not yet been possible because BDA is a new technology whose impact on the organisation cannot be assessed at this stage. Therefore, the literature has proposed assessing strategic value as combining symbolic and functional value, where functional value combines tangible, intangible and human resources. Human resources are particularly the most important and are assessed in this paper. As a result, this research defines the strategic value of the application as being on the cusp of being an “image-builder” to a “strategic transformer”. Although the application is a well-developed tool with a high potential for improvement, it has not yet realised its full potential. The strategy of how the BDA is used in the company and the most important aspect, human resources, still requires improvement. This paper recommends that change management and training activities may be further improved, and that business aims to better incorporate the application into existing processes. As users continue identifying the need for additional data, further research is needed to identify them and their metrics required to achieve the full application benefits.