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Product Description
Review
A primer for managers who want to introduce a more rigorous approach to the use of data.
--Financial Times, March 10, 2010
This book provides a comprehensive lowdown on how to apply analytics without neglecting the basics. Comprehensive with a useful appendix. --CPO Agenda, Spring 2010
--Financial Times, March 10, 2010
This book provides a comprehensive lowdown on how to apply analytics without neglecting the basics. Comprehensive with a useful appendix. --CPO Agenda, Spring 2010
Product Description
Most companies have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But a powerful new business tool - analytics - is enabling many firms to aggressively leverage their data in key business decisions and processes, with impressive results.
In their previous book, Competing on Analytics, Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris showed how pioneering firms were building their entire strategies around their analytical capabilities. Rather than ""going with the gut"" when pricing products, maintaining inventory, or hiring talent, managers in these firms use data, analysis, and systematic reasoning to make decisions that improve efficiency, risk-management, and profits.
Now, in Analytics at Work, Davenport, Harris, and coauthor Robert Morison reveal how any manager can effectively deploy analytics in day-to-day operations?one business decision at a time. They show how many types of analytical tools, from statistical analysis to qualitative measures like systematic behavior coding, can improve decisions about everything from what new product offering might interest customers to whether marketing dollars are being most effectively deployed.
Based on all-new research and illustrated with examples from companies including Humana, Best Buy, Progressive Insurance, and Hotels.com, this implementation-focused guide outlines the five-step DELTA model for deploying and succeeding with analytical initiatives. You'll learn how to:
- Use data more effectively and glean valuable analytical insights
- Manage and coordinate data, people, and technology at an enterprise level
- Understand and support what analytical leaders do
- Evaluate and choose realistic targets for analytical activity
- Recruit, hire, and manage analysts
Combining the science of quantitative analysis with the art of sound reasoning, Analytics at Work provides a road map and tools for unleashing the potential buried in your workforce.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Hardcover
This book illustrates how some businesses are improving results by using data analysis to inform decisions. This is a clear trend over the past decade and a wide range of examples are given.
What makes this useful is that it is written for business users who want to learn more about this area and improve the analytical capabilities within their organisations. So it includes frameworks which cover the stages of analytical evolution in a business, and the key ingredients for success, along with some thoughts on making the journey to more data-driven decision making.
I like the fact that it is concise and not a great thick tome, but still gives good coverage to a very topical subject. Although I've said it's really for non-analysts, I think analysts will also find it an encouraging and thought provoking book.
It's probably the best book for practically introducing the subject and the authors are all credible and advising major companies in this space.
What makes this useful is that it is written for business users who want to learn more about this area and improve the analytical capabilities within their organisations. So it includes frameworks which cover the stages of analytical evolution in a business, and the key ingredients for success, along with some thoughts on making the journey to more data-driven decision making.
I like the fact that it is concise and not a great thick tome, but still gives good coverage to a very topical subject. Although I've said it's really for non-analysts, I think analysts will also find it an encouraging and thought provoking book.
It's probably the best book for practically introducing the subject and the authors are all credible and advising major companies in this space.
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
great way to level set away from technology perspective to a business one (context of what matters and to whom)
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
22 reviews
124 of 142 people found the following review helpful
Pointless, meandering prose
16 Jun 2010
Format:Hardcover
This book contains some occasional flashes of brilliance, like Figure 1-1 which succinctly summarizes the key questions addressed by analytics. The rest of the book is padded with pointless, meandering and buzzwords-laden prose. Case in point:
"Stage 5 organizations develop a robust information management environment that provides an enterprise wide set of systems, applications, and governance processes. They begin by eliminating legacy systems and old spaghetti code and press forward to eliminate silos of information like data marts and spreadsheet marts. They hunt for pockets of standalone analytic applications and either migrate them to centralized analytic applications or shut them down."
The entire book actually reads like that.
As an applied statistician and an avid reader of business books, I cannot - for the life of me - imagine why people will want to write a book like this. What is the target reader of such a book? Technical professionals like myself will find the book absolutely useless to guide analytical projects. Business professionals will be confused and put off by all the buzzwords.
"Stage 5 organizations develop a robust information management environment that provides an enterprise wide set of systems, applications, and governance processes. They begin by eliminating legacy systems and old spaghetti code and press forward to eliminate silos of information like data marts and spreadsheet marts. They hunt for pockets of standalone analytic applications and either migrate them to centralized analytic applications or shut them down."
The entire book actually reads like that.
As an applied statistician and an avid reader of business books, I cannot - for the life of me - imagine why people will want to write a book like this. What is the target reader of such a book? Technical professionals like myself will find the book absolutely useless to guide analytical projects. Business professionals will be confused and put off by all the buzzwords.
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful
A good how-to book for adopting analytics
22 Jan 2010
Format:Hardcover
I received a pre-release copy of Tom Davenport' new book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. The book is a follow-on to Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning and is a shorter, pithier book than its predecessor. Once again Tom collaborates with Jeanne Harris and this time Robert Morison of the Concours group. Where the previous book focused on so-called analytic competitors, this is about "analytics for the rest of us". It is a very readable book with some good practical advice that does not require the remaking of your company in a new image. It is also a quick read, it is only 180 pages or so, which should help get more people to read it.
And I hope people do read it. As Tom says "The unexamined decision isn't worth making" and too many companies and organizations are making unexamined decisions, failing to apply data they have about what works and what does not, making the same mistakes over and making dumb decisions. Like Tom I think it is time for this to stop and this book will tell you how.
The book's focus is broad, covering how analytics can address key questions of information and insight in each of the past, present, future - reporting, alerts and forecasting give information in the past, present and future while modeling, recommendations and predictions/optimization do the same for insight. For me the most useful part of the book is part one - a set of chapters describing The Analytic DELTA - Data, Enterprise, Leadership, Targets and Analysts - what Tom regards as the 5 critical elements of successful analytic adoption:
* D - accessible, high quality data - I particularly like the focus on uniqueness as a criteria and on using the business need (decision) to drive data quality and integration
* E - enterprise orientation not fractured analytic projects
* L - analytical leadership
* T - strategic targets - a crucial element, that of focusing on using analytics to develop distinctive capabilities. This chapter has a great list of processes that lend themselves to analytics and a very helpful "ladder of analytic applications" to develop from simple to more complex analytic solutions
* A - analysts - a nice chapter with good thoughts on how to manage analysts as a strategic resource.
Part two addresses how to stay analytical through embedding analytics in business processes, building an analytic culture, reviewing your business comprehensively and embarking on an analytical journey towards "more analytical decisions and better results." I really liked the focus on embedding analytics in business processes - this is a topic close to my heart and one we discussed in Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions. The authors do a nice job of explaining why organizations need to adopt a test and learn mindset, to be always unsatisfied and mindful of change and to focus on an "industrial" analytic process.
The authors end by pointing out that becoming analytic is not a one-time activity but must be ongoing - it is a journey which organizations must begin, where they must build momentum and where they must go from thinking of analytics to thinking about decisions and decision making, from analytic management to decision management.
It's a great book and you should buy it.
And I hope people do read it. As Tom says "The unexamined decision isn't worth making" and too many companies and organizations are making unexamined decisions, failing to apply data they have about what works and what does not, making the same mistakes over and making dumb decisions. Like Tom I think it is time for this to stop and this book will tell you how.
The book's focus is broad, covering how analytics can address key questions of information and insight in each of the past, present, future - reporting, alerts and forecasting give information in the past, present and future while modeling, recommendations and predictions/optimization do the same for insight. For me the most useful part of the book is part one - a set of chapters describing The Analytic DELTA - Data, Enterprise, Leadership, Targets and Analysts - what Tom regards as the 5 critical elements of successful analytic adoption:
* D - accessible, high quality data - I particularly like the focus on uniqueness as a criteria and on using the business need (decision) to drive data quality and integration
* E - enterprise orientation not fractured analytic projects
* L - analytical leadership
* T - strategic targets - a crucial element, that of focusing on using analytics to develop distinctive capabilities. This chapter has a great list of processes that lend themselves to analytics and a very helpful "ladder of analytic applications" to develop from simple to more complex analytic solutions
* A - analysts - a nice chapter with good thoughts on how to manage analysts as a strategic resource.
Part two addresses how to stay analytical through embedding analytics in business processes, building an analytic culture, reviewing your business comprehensively and embarking on an analytical journey towards "more analytical decisions and better results." I really liked the focus on embedding analytics in business processes - this is a topic close to my heart and one we discussed in Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions. The authors do a nice job of explaining why organizations need to adopt a test and learn mindset, to be always unsatisfied and mindful of change and to focus on an "industrial" analytic process.
The authors end by pointing out that becoming analytic is not a one-time activity but must be ongoing - it is a journey which organizations must begin, where they must build momentum and where they must go from thinking of analytics to thinking about decisions and decision making, from analytic management to decision management.
It's a great book and you should buy it.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
A Helpful Guide to Making Decisions
19 Jan 2010
Format:Hardcover
I just received this book and read it quickly. I had read the Davenport/Harris "Competing on Analytics," which has come to be the Bible of business-oriented analytics books. This one is even more accessible, and is broader in its orientation. It's not just for companies that want to compete on their analytical capabilities, but for any organization that needs to make more analytical decisions. The DELTA framework is a clear way to describe the key factors necessary to become more analytical, and the chapters on culture and decision-making in the second half of the book are very helpful. The ideas in this book are unusually easy to apply and it includes handy frameworks and models. Given the rise in analytical activity in organizations, I predict that this book will be just as successful as the first one, if not more so because of its broader focus.
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