Firms are involved in the rapid evolution of big data technologies and are increasingly interested in the potential of big data. Big data promises to create added value in a variety of operations (OECD 2013) and has been identified as the next big thing in innovation (Gobble 2013; Wamba et al. 2017). However, a long list of Information Technology (IT) systems has been announced as being value creating, once implemented into organisations, without actually, satisfying the expectations: this is a recurrent bandwagon phenomenon in the IT domain, with recent examples coming from ebusiness (Coltman et al. 2000), green Information Systems (IS) (Dedrick 2010) and blockchain (Avital et al. 2016). Hence, the complex and crucial question of ‘Whether, when, and how to innovate with information technology, confronts managers in virtually all of today’s enterprises’ (Swanson and Ramiller 2004, 553). Accordingly, when the innovation is highly debated and publicly promoted by policy-makers and the mass media, as in the case of big data, deliberative behaviour can be swamped (Swanson and Ramiller 2004). Is big data the current ‘me too’ phenomenon? Based on the practical importance of big data in firms, provided also by policy-makers and mass media, today firms try to leverage on big data and big data technologies in order to capture and profit from the enormous amount of data available from many sources, such as social media activities, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, web information, mobile phone usage and consumer preferences expressed on the web (Davenport 2014). These business initiatives can imply profound changes in the way companies manage their customers and their business models. Accordingly, recent studies assert that ‘big data is more than a technological issue, and to be fully effective, big data needs to become part of the fabric of organisations’ (Braganza et al. 2017, 329). Recent research suggests that big data is a driver of business success across a wide range of industries (McAfee et al. 2012). Organisations are investing considerable resources in big data initiatives in their search for value creation opportunities (Chen, Chiang, and Storey 2012), in order to drive their digital business strategies (Bharadwaj et al. 2013), to transform supply chains (Wang et al. 2016a; Gunasekaran et al. 2017), to allow them to make better-informed business decisions (Eastburn and Boland 2015), and finally to improve firm performance (Ji-Fan Ren et al. 2016). Nonetheless, alerts are being launched to make managers aware of the fact that big data is not a panacea (Akter et al. 2016), ‘an uncritical analysis of poorly understood data sets does not generate knowledge’ (Matthias et al. 2017, 41).