Augmented Analytics

Chapter 2. The Analytics Problem

As we briefly discussed in Chapter 1, analytics has become an indispensable capability in today’s transforming business world. As data volumes grow exponentially, organizations’ ability to collect, process, analyze, and glean insights from data is more critical than ever before for staying competitive.

Analytics serves as the bridge that connects raw, unstructured data with meaningful, actionable insights. It enables organizations to shift from relying on intuition and past experiences to making decisions using a data-driven approach. With analytics, organizations can precisely measure outcomes, perform attribution analysis, optimize processes, predict future trends and events, and simulate scenarios. Powerful analytics capacities allow organizations to be more proactive and forward-looking and inform how they develop and improve their products, services, and business models. Analytics is everywhere—or, at least, it should be.

This chapter will help you understand the importance of doing analytics, determine your organization’s analytics readiness, and cross the chasm that prevents your company from being data- and, ultimately, insight-driven. But what does “being insight-driven” even mean?

We will explain more about the concept of being data-driven versus insight-driven in this chapter. To be fair, though, there is no single, universal definition of “being insight-driven.” What works for a tech startup might not apply to a traditional manufacturing ...