Leading in Analytics

Introduction: The Last Analytics Mile

THE LAST MILE TO ANALYTICS SUCCESS

Analytics became widely known and accepted as a competitive imperative in 2006 when Thomas Davenport published his landmark article, “Competing on Analytics,” which soon became one of the top‐10 must‐read articles in the history of Harvard Business Review.¹ Analytics had always been helpful, but as long as your competitors were not using it, you had a chance to survive without it, too.

Now that analytics has become affordable and practical to do at scale, everyone is doing it, and so must you if you wish to survive in the new age of Big Data, and the intense competitive pressure brought on by those who know how to “compete on analytics” well. Ahmer Inam, chief data and AI officer at Relanto, painted a stark picture of the competitive landscape when he said businesses in today's world must “do analytics or die.”²

Most businesses know the importance of using analytics, prompting them to invest more than $100 billion by 2018,³ which shows what was collectively spent by organizations to take advantage of the power of analytics. Unfortunately, close to $90 billion of those funds missed the mark by failing to generate the expected return on investment (ROI). That is right: nearly 90% of all analytics projects failed to generate “significant financial benefit,” according to a report that MIT released in 2020.⁴ No matter how good we analytics professionals are at building models, if they are not adopted and integrated ...