How to Compete on Analytics

How to Compete on Analytics Thomas Davenport describes the prerequisites and the five stages of analytic competitiveness By Alison Bolen Thomas Davenport's article "Competing on Analytics" was the best‐selling Harvard Business Review reprint in 2006. To write it, Davenport,The President's Distinguished Professor in Management and Information Technology at Babson College, studied the characteristics of more than 50 leading organizations that have made a commitment to quantitative, fact‐based analysis. Why is the January 2006 Harvard Business Review article so popular? We recently asked the author and educator that question and discussed further insights from his research that will be detailed in his new book, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. Here, Davenport, one of the 10 "masters of the new economy," according to CIO magazine, tells us what he's learned and what every company can take away from his research. What are the three most important takeaways of your research? THOMAS DAVENPORT: One ‐ which might not be surprising to the average SAS reader ‐ is that companies and organizations are finally doing something with all their data. After years and years of accumulating it and thinking they needed better transaction data, a lot of organizations are finally at the point where they say, "OK, we don't have any excuses left. We need to start managing our business differently on the basis of our data." The second takeaway is that you can successfully compete on analytics. And that really is the primary point of the research. I don't think that anybody had made that point before: that analytics could be an integral part of your strategy. The third important takeaway is that you need more than data and technology to be an analytic competitor. The real differentiating factors tend to be human factors, like leadership and passion and skills and relationships, which I think have largely been neglected in all