The mediating role of big data analytics in enhancing firms’ commitment to sustainability

The era of big data has overturned the classical model of how businesses work. Companies are now dealing with data as one of their most valuable assets that fuels their digital strategies to overcome the competition. As the potential of big data analytics is endless, looking for any impact from this cutting-edge technology on sustainability could lead to new insights about this paradigm. This paper represents a quantitative study that included 41 Moroccan firms from diverse industries. By using a Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) approach, the results showed that big data analytics may enhance companies' commitment to sustainability (p-value =0) if the firm crafted the right digital strategy fuelled by data (p-value=0), established a data-driven decision-making culture (p-value =0.008), and acquired the right talents with soft skills (p-value = 0.029). Against all expectations, the results showed that technical skills do not play a significant role and do not boost the mediating role of big data regarding sustainability (p-value=0.124).