Our industry has to get much more analytical in how we make decisions about the analytic tool sets and techniques we deploy.  

I recently pinged 2,500 senior decision-makers to ask how their organizations made decisions about analytics investments. I was surprised that for more than 60% of the respondents, decision-making around analytic strategy, architecture, tool sets, base platforms, techniques and capability development is basically ad hoc — they’ve been winging it. I needn’t point out the deep irony in that. 

The transcendent importance of analytics has been clear for some time. In my book The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics (Wiley, 2009), I argued that analytics was emerging as an affordable and accessible source of competitive advantage. In the seven years since then, almost a thousand books and tens of thousands of blog posts, articles and webinars have piled on the proposition that analytics is a good thing. Washington insiders take it as fact that investment in analytics — or lack of investment — was the difference maker in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. Enough already. I don’t think we need any more surveys documenting “analytics, good; no analytics, bad.” It is time we added a little more nuance to the discussion.

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