Data: The Prerequisite for Everything Analytical--How to Manage Your Data for More Effective General Management

By: Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris and Robert Morison

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Synopsis: For too long, managers have relied on their intuition or their "golden gut" to make decisions. Important decisions have been based not on data, but on the experience and unaided judgment of the decision maker. Sometimes intuitive and experience-based decisions work out well, but all too often they go astray, end in disaster, or result in money being left on the table. If you think that your organization ought to make more decisions based on facts (and less on gut-level instinct), or if you want to unleash the potential buried in your company's underleveraged data, analytics are the answer. In this chapter, the authors of the groundbreaking Competing on Analytics provide an overview of what it means to use analytics in your business - the types of questions analytics can answer, when analytics might fall short, how analytics combine art and science, and even how poor analytical decisions contributed to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. They argue convincingly that even if your company has no plans to restructure itself around becoming an analytical competitor, now is the time to put analytics to work for better decision making at all levels of the organization. This chapter was originally published as Chapter 2 of Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results.