The Analytic Hospitality Executive

CHAPTER 4From Reactive to Proactive Decision Making: Advanced Analytics in Action

An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts—for support rather than illumination.

—Andrew Lang, author

Data only has value when you can turn it from information to insight. That is the topic of this chapter. All of the best data management solutions with the latest, most flexible visualization tools will only provide so much insight. True insight is derived when you can use all of that data to uncover key relationships and employ them to predict and plan for the future. That is the role of advanced analytics. Advanced analytics are complex mathematical algorithms. Many managers suffered through their calculus and statistics classes in high school and college, if they even had to take any, and haven’t wanted to look back since. The very idea of advanced analytics can be intimidating. Now that you have a vision for a strategic analytic culture, established in Chapter 1, an understanding of how to capture, store, and process your data from Chapter 2, and have learned about opportunities in data visualization in Chapter 3, this chapter will help you get past this intimidation, and give you enough of an understanding of the techniques and their value to help you guide your organization toward a competitive advantage gleaned from the smart use of your second most important asset, your data.

You don’t have to have a master’s or PhD in statistics to understand where and how ...