The opportunity for analytics

Final interesting article in DM Review this month - Dealing with Data: Data Analytics: A Huge Opportunity by Shari Rogalski. She does a nice job of summarizing the research and makes some good points. A couple of things I wanted to highlight:

• You must move to a predictive mindset, not an analyze-the-past mindset. Check out my predictive analytics FAQ if you are not sure what this means
• You must act first, not just know first, if your data is going to give you a competitive edge
• Retail may be a growth area but financial services and insurance, among others, have been doing this a while in risk-centric decisions
• You need to focus on the decisions you are trying to improve, not just on the data
• One of the great benefits of this approach is that front-line staff, and self-service systems, get the benefit of analytical insight without having to look at reports themselves - a change in mindset

I just reviewed Tom Davenport's great new book, Competing on Analytics, and if you like the article you should probably pre-order it here. I also mentioned another accenture study in a long post promoted by a TDWI survey on Predictive Analytics - that post has all the links you could need or want to explore the topic so I will leave it there.

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