Competing on Analytics

Here is a book I am eagerly anticipating. Thomas Davenport wrote an article of the same name for Harvard Business Review in January of 2006. I found the article enormously helpful for equipping researchers to make the case for building internal analytics programs. I will circle back to write a review in upcoming months.

The New York Police Department does it. The Harrah's casinos in Las Vegas do it. And businesses like Netflix are built entirely on the basis of it. It, in this case, is using the sophisticated analysis of data -- or "analytics" -- to drive decisions. As a concept, analytics is neither new nor complicated. Any dieter standing on the bathroom scale can attest that numbers are a more reliable source of information than intuition or a spouse's kind opinion. You might feel fit, but the numbers don't lie.

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