Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

Chapter 3

Aligning Key Business Challenges across the Enterprise

“Accept challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory!”

—George S. Patton

In today’s unstable economy, business analytics in some form has become almost ubiquitous in the corporate world. Companies doing business in highly competitive marketplaces seek to identify and harness their customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer wallet share growth strategies by leveraging analytics. Depending on their analytics maturity, they may take the business analytics road at different stages of development.

At the same time, many companies are now inundated with a large volume and velocity of data from multiple locations and sources: B2B data, B2C data, traffic data, transactional data, third-party vendor data, macroeconomic data, and so on. On top of the more traditional data sources, Web data, social media data, mobile data, and new third-party sources have added another layer of complexity to the big data puzzle that companies are eager to resolve. Although some don’t even know where to start in dealing with their data avalanche, others are still struggling to move from beyond basic reporting.

This is where the process of aligning key business questions across the enterprise can help. Business analytics must prioritize its resources and activities, as well as help the overall organization get the highest return on investment for its analytical efforts. As we outlined in Chapter 2, we believe our BASP ...