Abstract
Big data has been topic of interest from past two decades now. No wonder it is still a huge topic of discussion due to its increasing interest, demand, and vast amount of data. However, unstructured data is the latest topic of interest as this data is a type of data which is available in the larger companies already and they are now focusing on this data to analyse it, see patterns and utilise it to make better and data driven decisions for company growth and performance. Larger companies have dedicated resources, budget, tools, technologies, and capacity to invest their efforts towards this unstructured data. However, SMEs which have limited resources and budget are not well-aware of the importance of unstructured data that is already available in their company, and hence, they are lacking this knowledge strength and needs more focus on this area. This research study is focused to explore the extent to which engineering SMEs are aware of unstructured data and its importance. Engineering SMEs are the ones who are closed related to data and IT sector, hence engineering SMEs are selected for this research to identify the barriers and enablers to improving the data management across SMEs. Initially, in-depth introduction has been provided on unstructured data followed by the literature review which elaborates the history of unstructured data, how this data was being used in larger companies and how SMEs are lacking to make use of t\his data. For this study, qualitative research methodology was used by conducting interviews with the participants from 10 engineering SMEs within Australia. The results will elaborate in depth what are the barriers in the engineering SMEs within Australia. Furthermore, this research is also focused to identify the leadership challenges in the SMEs in the current era of data. The objectives of this study are tested through the qualitative research method by conducting interviews with the managers of engineering SMEs in Australia. The participants have given responses based on their experiences at work and the data analysis is presented with the help of thematic analysis technique. The data collection and analysis are completed by conducting interview and these questions were closely related to the research questions of this study. It is crucial to understand the unstructured data usage in SMEs. Finally, the findings are presented with conclusions derived from the literature review and responses of the participants. The findings from this research are crucial to fulfill the gap from the theoretical literature. This study has successfully proven that the gap has been fulfilled by observing that the SMEs are also giving importance to unstructured data, and they are using their data to make data-driven decisions rather than taking decisions on intuitions. Furthermore, recommendations are provided for future researchers based on the limitations of this study to explore further in this area. This research is significant to the SMEs, start-ups, academic institutions, policy making government of Australia, non-government institutes and the research organisations.