Modern Analytics Platforms

Chapter 2. Agility and the Progression of Analytics

In this chapter, you’ll learn more about how analytics has evolved to support greater business agility at scale. Rodney Heisterberg and Alakh Verma, in their 2014 book Creating Business Agility, defined business agility as “innovation via collaboration to be able to anticipate challenges and opportunities before they occur.”¹ To Heisterberg and Verma, “intelligent collaboration through automated business processes has the ability to alter the course of any important business activity.” As an organization adopts more sophisticated analytics, it unlocks this type of smart collaboration. In particular, an organization’s static and historically focused descriptive analytics become augmented with dynamic, insightful, and real-time predictive analytics.

The Elements of an Analytics Strategy

An organization’s analytics strategy is how its people, processes, tools, and data work together to collect, store, and analyze data.

With the first element, we’ll explore where, when, and how people engage with data and analytics. As previously discussed, intelligent collaboration is critical to business agility, so we’ll take a look at how different strategies stack up.

Any discussion about data in the modern organization doesn’t go far without reference to the data scientist, which in an infamous 2012 Harvard Business Review article was described as the “sexiest job of the 21st century.”² But there are many critical roles needed to foster a ...