Competing on Analytics

This landmark work, the first to introduce business leaders to analytics, reveals how analytics are rewriting the rules of competition. Updated with fresh content, Competing on Analytics provides the road map for becoming an analytical competitor, showing readers how to create new strategies for their organizations based on sophisticated analytics. Introducing a five-stage model of analytical competition, Davenport and Harris describe the typical behaviors, capabilities, and challenges of each stage. They explain how to assess your company’s capabilities and guide it toward the highest level of competition. With equal emphasis on two key resources, human and technological, this book reveals how even the most highly analytical companies can up their game. With an emphasis on predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous analytics for marketing, supply chain, finance, M&A, operations, R&D, and HR, the book contains numerous new examples from different industries and business functions, such as Disney’s vacation experience, Google’s HR, UPS’s logistics, the Chicago Cubs’ training methods, and Firewire Surfboards’ customization. Additional new topics and research include: Data scientists and what they do; Big data and the changes it has wrought; Hadoop and other open-source software for managing and analyzing data; Data products—new products and services based on data and analytics; Machine learning and other AI technologies; The Internet of Things and its implications; New computing architectures, including cloud computing; Embedding analytics within operational systems; and Visual analytics. The business classic that turned a generation of leaders into analytical competitors, Competing on Analytics is the definitive guide for transforming your company’s fortunes in the age of analytics and big data.