Businesses Need More Than Analytics to Succeed

April 13, 2009 Analytics No Comments

The current climate has highlighted the need for more information, faster, and in a format that is instantly usable. As companies seek to avoid the trap of massive discounting they are turning to analytics to identify opportunities to instead increase value, through bundling products with smaller, incremental margins.

Analytic insights about customers, products, channels, partners and pricing is only half of the solution. The other half being the profitable and strategic application of the information revealed from the analyltics. Thus, decision making is not wholly handed off to analytics. In the four step decision making process: framing the issue, intelligence negotiating outcomes and ongoing learnings gains immensely when the intelligence part of the equation is from valid data, rather than relying on accurate recollection of personal memory.

Thus, analytics must be integrated into the conceptual framework of decision management. This framework encapsulates not only the process used for decision making, but the business rules applied to the process, and the outcomes from each stage of the process.

Adding analytical insight into the decision making process is providing better operational decisions and more integrated strategies.