Big data tools and techniques in the UK retail sector

Abstract

This study is based on interviews with 12 leading Big Data users/consultants in the UK retail sector. These companies included those operating pure off-line, both online and offline, pure online retailers and also Big Data consultants. We used Technology-Organisation-Environment framework to structure the interviews. A number of Big Data tools and techniques have been mentioned by our interviewees. They included, among others, tools such as Excel including special macros and add-ins, SQL, SAP, SAS and SIMALTO. We provide a more detailed analysis of these tools and techniques in this paper.