Business Analytics As Bride Or Bridesmaid

I recently covered the topic of enterprise analytics. The philosophy behind business analytics had always been - mine the transaction data under your management to detect trends and extract insights that will give you competitive advantage.This only becomes more compelling with every year’s exponential expansion of the universe of accessible transaction data & the internet enablement of IT exacerbates the trend. Geoffrey Moore points out that Business analytics needs to close the loop from generating the insights to using them to drive operating procedures that can systematically capitalize upon them in time and at scale has been the exception rather than the rule.When the exception happens, the results are transforming. But for the most part we see a landscape of intermittent connections, flashes of insight, but no systemic gain. He is on the mark in pointing out that most of the business analytics engagements inside enterprises represent a highly evolved form of corporate entertainment. Its core practitioners generate insights without accountability. They communicate those insights to business managers, who do have accountability and who are moved to act, but who are unable to do so in time. As a result the insights become part of a growing library of great but lost opportunities, supporting a culture eroding into passive aggressive despair. The right answer as he sees is to grow business analytics in closed-loop systems where operationalizing the insight, making the bet, and keeping track of wins and losses, is inseparable from the generating the insight. With this firmly set in, organizations gear up to apply technology—with a mixture of brute force and finesse—to multiple business problems. Organizations shall then direct their energies toward finding the right focus, building the right culture, and hiring the right people to make optimal use of the data they constantly churn. In the end, as Tom Davenport very rightly says so, that people and strategy, as much as information technology, give such organizations strength.Most companies in most industries have excellent reasons to pursue strategies shaped by analytics.