Leaders and Innovators

Foreword

By James Taylor

I have been working with advanced analytics since 2001 and have watched the market evolve and mature over the intervening years. Where once only banks focused on predictive analytics to manage risk, now companies across all industries do. The role of advanced analytics in managing the customer journey has gone from innovative to mainstream. The time to develop and deploy advanced analytics has gone from months to seconds, even as the amount of data being analyzed has exploded. Leading companies see analytics as a core competency, not just a point solution, and innovators are increasingly looking at data as a source of future innovation. How to become data-driven and win with analytics is on everyone's to-do list, and books like the one Tho has written are critical in developing a practical plan to achieve data-driven, analytic innovation.

Tho and I met a few years ago when we co-presented on analytics through our work as faculty members of the International Institute for Analytics. We have a shared interest in the technologies and approaches that are both driving the increased use of analytics in organizations and responding to the increased demand from organizations of every size and in every industry.

All organizations have data, and we live in an era where organizations have more of this data digitized and accessible than ever before. More digital channels and more devices generate digital exhaust about our customers, partners, suppliers, and even ...