I recently read an interesting book. Thornton May’s The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics is not your ordinary book about analytics or dashboards or data. It’s about how the world is changing and what role analysis and analysts will play in determining the success of organizations and individuals. May believes we are on a “hinge of history,” that we are living through momentous change. “The new law of the new jungle stated simply,” he says “is: Know and prosper; not know: Wither and die.” But just knowing is not enough. His “Reality #1” is that you must DO something with the information that you have. You’ll need to be able to transform data into knowledge into action. Yet “there will be an incomprehensible, mind-exploding massive expansion in the amount of information floating around.” (That’s my favorite line in the book.)
How on Earth do you process this amount of data and turn it into actionable knowledge? May’s conclusion is that you turn to analytics and he cites numerous examples of successful companies in many industries that have broken away from the pack through the use of intelligence systems that reveal competitive insights.
In just a short time after I entered the business intelligence field, I was hooked on the value of business intelligence. BI gives you new ways to look at data—visualizations that turn overwhelming amounts of complex, interrelated data into an easily digestible story, interfaces that let you manipulate the numbers at the speed of thought, dashboards that enable you to constantly track the pulse of your business at a glance, and distribution options that let you share results and collaborate with others. This is the stuff of the future—now.
According to May, we are on the verge of a “business analytics tornado,” a stampede demanding this technology to catch up with the leaders who have already implemented BI and other analytical tools. He says, “Business intelligence…has been at the top of the technology agenda for the past three years. I envision it staying there for the next decade. The sector has migrated from a data-centric orientation…to a decision-centric orientation”. So if you haven’t already implemented BI in your organization, you may be going down that path soon.
In an afterword by Alan Webber, a former editorial director of Harvard Business Review and co-founder of Fast Company magazine, he seeks an answer to the question, what is business analytics? In an effort to respect his copyright, I am retelling only a portion of his very astute answer.
“So the answer to the question, what is business analytics is this:
…The work of business analytics is “choice architecture”—organizing context within which people can make better decisions.
…The work of business analytics is sensemaking—separating the signal from the noise, recognizing patterns that may be obscured by the trivia of transactions or buried in the morass of dailyness.
The work of business analytics is detecting weak signals—spotting trends before they arrive, sighting the future while standing in the present.”
The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics by Thornton May is an insightful book with a powerful message. Besides that, it’s a plain good read. Maybe you’ll get a chance to pick it up over the coming weeks. Happy Holidays!
BIO Analytics provides business intelligence software and services for Microsoft Dynamics. To view a short video overview of business intelligence, click here. And feel free to email me with your business intelligence questions, even if they are not about BIO specifically.
By Sandi Richards Forman of BIO Analytics Corp., a Business Intelligence (BI) Microsoft Dynamics ISV
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