1 Corporate Familiarity, Readiness And Attitude Regarding Big Data Analytics In Down-Stream Petroleum Industry Obara, Chizi Ernuchi Department of Office and Information Management, Rivers State University, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria chizi.obara@ust.edu.ng ABSTRACT Nowadays companies are starting to realize the importance of using more data in order to support decision for their strategies. It was said and proved through study cases that more data usually beats better algorithms. With this statement, companies started to realize that they can chose to invest more in processing larger sets of data rather than investing in expensive algorithms. Big data technologies provide approaches and tools that are essential for the competitive development of the oil and gas industry. The large quantity of data is better used as a whole because of the possible correlations on a larger amount, correlations that can never be found if the data is analyzed on separate sets or on a smaller set. A larger amount of data gives a better output but also working with it can become a challenge due to processing limitations. This article looks at big data analytics in the oil and gas sector vis-à-vis its application and contribution. Qualitative research method was employed through the use of secondary information. It was found that big data analytics contribute immensely to organizational success; however its application is still at the infant rate. It was therefore recommended that oil and gas firms should raise awareness in the field of big data analytics. Keywords: Big Data, Big Data Analytics, Enterprise Information System, Oil and Gas INTRODUCTION We are awash in a flood of data today as data is being collected at an unprecedented scale. We can associate the importance of big data and big data analysis with the society that we live in. Today we are living in an informational society and we are moving towards a knowledge based society and decisions that previously were based on guesswork, or on painstakingly constructed models of reality, can now be made based on the data itself. Such big data analysis now drives nearly every aspect of our modern society, including mobile services, retail, manufacturing, financial services, life sciences, physical sciences and the oil and gas sector. In order to extract better knowledge we need a bigger amount of data. The society of information is a society where information plays a major role in the economical, cultural, political and commercial arena (Agarwal ET AL., 2010). In the knowledge society the competitive advantage is gained through understanding the information and predicting the evolution of facts based on data. The same happens with big data. Every organization needs to collect a large set of data in order to support its decision and extract correlations through data analysis as a basis for decisions (Raghupathi and Raghupathi, 2014). The world today is built on the foundations of data. Lives today are impacted by the ability of the organization to dispose, interrogate and manage data. The development of technology infrastructure is adapted to help generate data, so that all the offered services can be improved as they are used. In order to manage the giant volume of unstructured data stored, it has been emerged the big data phenomena (Zikipoulos, Deutsch and Deroos, 2012). It stands to reason that in the commercial sector big data has been adopted International Journal of Business & Law Research 11(3):1-11, July-Sept., 2023 © SEAHI PUBLICATIONS, 2023 www.seahipaj.org ISSN: 2360-8986