AI-Enabled Analytics for Business

CHAPTER 9Cases of Analytics Failures from Deviation to the Roadmap

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

—Richard Branson¹

This portion of the book is extraordinarily enlightening, especially in terms of why analytics fails to get traction even in the face of successful pilots. We will see how failures are obvious and avoidable yet happen for the most flawed reasons. It is a tragedy to have achieved successful proofs of concept (POCs) that are then discarded for the worst of excuses. When the gold ring is in hand, it is lost—not dropped clumsily but wantonly thrown to the ground. It is a shameful loss of time and capital when business performance improvement has been proven and then is not pursued.

However, with budget, bandwidth, and the discipline of focus, the fruits of an AI-enabled Analytics Culture for data-driven decisions are immense. We will discuss reachable projects with exceptional results in manageable time frames.

The worst-case scenario for implementing analytics is the loss of a modicum of time and capital, which is not a threat to the business. But an existential threat to the business results from being blind to insights due to the lack of analytics, as it leaves you unaware of competitive threats, market opportunities, and broken internal processes. The cases to be discussed were all achievable with discipline, budget, and focus that almost any company can afford and that yielded insights to better plan the future rather ...