97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know

Chapter 61. Business Realities Will Defeat Your Analytics

Richard Hackathorn

Industry Analyst, Bolder Technology

The next generation of data analytics (casually called AI) is rapidly evolving and achieving impressive feats of reasoning at increasing scale. For a few high-tech companies, it has globally transformed their ecommerce interactions and the entire market dynamics.¹

Most executives of typical corporations assume that enterprise systems will be the next to benefit. Although next-gen analytics is here for some, the skills and practices for using next-gen analytics properly are not evenly distributed. Unfortunately, this gap steadily widens.²

In the past, analytics was limited to self-contained projects to generate visual insights into specific business situations, which managers then used to set policies and procedures. Next-gen analytics is shifting to operational modules embedded throughout enterprise systems, directly exposing analytics to the complexities of live business realities. Analytic-savvy executives are likely to be unjustifiably comfortable that next-gen analytic tools will triumph over those nasty realities.

Will these next-gen analytic solutions survive the wilds of your business realities? The following key areas of the data-to-action value chain should be of special concern to all executives.³

Conceiving

Business use cases for next-gen analytics are tricky ...