Delivering Business Analytics: Practical Guidelines for Best Practice

Chapter 11

Decision-Making Structures

Insight without execution is worthless. It’s obvious that action is a critical part of getting value out of business analytics. However, getting an organization to act on insight carries its own set of problems.

Translating qualitative recommendations into operational processes isn’t always straightforward. Insight is intangible—it’s often hard to measure it after the fact. Scalability is a constant challenge. Making sure decision making keeps pace with increases in data volumes creates its own set of challenges.

Linking insight to outcome is the final piece of the puzzle. Understanding how best to go about operationalizing insight can be challenging—most organizations struggle with:

• Linking insight to outcomes in a highly scalable and measurable way
• Scaling their decision-making processes to deal with big data
• Driving relevancy in their decision making by taking into account current information
• Taking into account both what’s known ahead of time as well as what may not be known in advance

The solutions described in the next section focus on frameworks and techniques that help describe and overcome these challenges.

LINKING ANALYTICS TO VALUE

CASE STUDY: WHY READ THIS?

When will this help?

Read this if you struggle to close the link between insight and value.

How will it help you?

Using this approach will help you close the business analytics loop and demonstrate value creation.

What are the guiding principles?

• Drive outcomes, not insight ...