Competing on Analytics
The Harvard Business Review has recently published an article by Babson College's Tom H. Davenport on how analytics is becoming a key competitive factor for companies. Some key points made in the article:
- Companies such as Amazon, Harrah's, Capital One, and the Boston Red Sox have all dominated their fields by deploying industrial-strength analytics across a wide variety of activities.
- Business processes are among the few remaining points of differentiation for companies -- and analytics competitors extract every last drop of value from those processes.
- In companies that compete on analytics, senior executives make it clear--from the top down--that analytics is central to strategy.
- Statistical analysis, and quantitative activity, in these companies, is managed at the enterprise (not departmental) level.
Readings: Business intelligence
