Analytics management

By: PAUL WILLMOTT ET AL

The payoff from joining the big-data and advanced-analytics management revolution is no longer in doubt. The tally of successful case studies continues to build, reinforcing broader research, suggesting that when companies inject data and analytics deep into their operations, they can deliver productivity and profit gains that are 5-6% higher than those of the competition.

The promised land of new data-driven businesses, greater transparency into how operations actually work, better predictions and faster testing is alluring. But that doesn’t make it easier to get from here to there. The required investment, measured both in money and management commitment, can be large. CIOs stress the need to remake data architectures and applications totally.

Outside vendors hawk the power of black-box models to crunch through unstructured data in search of cause-and-effect relationships. Business managers scratch their heads — insisting that they must know the payoff from the spending and from the potentially disruptive organisational changes. The answer, simply put, is to develop a plan. Literally.

It may sound obvious, but in our experience, the missing step for most companies is spending the time required to create a simple plan for how data, analytics, frontline tools and people come together to create business value. The power of a plan is that it provides a common language allowing everyone to discuss where the greatest returns will come from.

From “Big Data: What’s Your Plan?”