Is your company ready for the next wave of analytics? Data analytics offer the opportunity to predict the future, use advanced technologies, and gain valuable insights about your business. But unless you're staying on top of the latest developments, your company is wasting that potential--and your competitors will be gaining speed while you fall behind. Strategic Analytics: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will provide you with today's essential thinking about what data analytics are capable of, what critical talents your company needs to reap their benefits, and how to adopt analytics throughout your organization--before it's too late. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues--blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more--each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas--and prepare you and your company for the future.

The New Edition of a Business Classic This landmark work, the first to introduce business leaders to analytics, reveals how analytics are rewriting the rules of competition. Updated with fresh content, Competing on Analytics provides the road map for becoming an analytical competitor, showing readers how to create new strategies for their organizations based on sophisticated analytics. Introducing a five-stage model of analytical competition, Davenport and Harris describe the typical behaviors, capabilities, and challenges of each stage. They explain how to assess your company’s capabilities and guide it toward the highest level of competition. With equal emphasis on two key resources, human and technological, this book reveals how even the most highly analytical companies can up their game. With an emphasis on predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous analytics for marketing, supply chain, finance, M&A, operations, R&D, and HR, the book contains numerous new examples from different industries and business functions, such as Disney’s vacation experience, Google’s HR, UPS’s logistics, the Chicago Cubs’ training methods, and Firewire Surfboards’ customization. Additional new topics and research include: Data scientists and what they do Big data and the changes it has wrought Hadoop and other open-source software for managing and analyzing data Data products—new products and services based on data and analytics Machine learning and other AI technologies The Internet of Things and its implications New computing architectures, including cloud computing Embedding analytics within operational systems Visual analytics The business classic that turned a generation of leaders into analytical competitors, Competing on Analytics is the definitive guide for transforming your company’s fortunes in the age of analytics and big data.

How to lead the change Analytics are driving big changes, not only in what marketing departments do but in how they are organized, staffed, led, and run. Leaders are grappling with issues that range from building an analytically driven marketing organization and determining the kinds of structure and talent that are needed to leading interactions with IT, finance, and sales and creating a unified view of the customer. The Analytical Marketer provides critical insight into the changing marketing organization—digital, agile, and analytical—and the tools for reinventing it. Written by the head of global marketing for SAS, The Analytical Marketer is based on the author’s firsthand experience of transforming a marketing organization from “art” to “art and science.” Challenged and inspired by their company’s own analytics products, the SAS marketing team was forced to rethink itself in order to take advantage of the new capabilities that those tools offer the modern marketer. Key marketers and managers at SAS tell their stories alongside the author’s candid lessons learned as she led the marketing organization’s transformation. With additional examples from other leading companies, this book is a practical guide and set of best practices for creating a new marketing culture that thrives on and adds value through data and analytics.

The Analytics and Big Data collection offers a “greatest hits” digital compilation of ideas from world-renowned thought leader Thomas Davenport, who helped popularize the terms analytics and big data in the workplace. An agile and prolific thinker, Davenport has written or coauthored more than a dozen bestselling books. Several of these titles are offered together for the first time in this curated digital bundle, including: Big Data at Work, Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work, and Keeping Up with the Quants. The collection also includes Davenport’s popular Harvard Business Review articles, “Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” (2012) and “Analytics 3.0” (2013). Combined, these works cover all the bases on analytics and big data: what each term means; the ramifications of each from a technical, consumer, and management perspective; and where each can have the biggest impact on your business. Whether you’re an executive, a manager, or a student wanting to learn more, Analytics and Big Data is the most comprehensive collection you’ll find on the ever-growing phenomenon of digital data and analysis—and how you can make this rising business trend work for you. Named one of the ten “Masters of the New Economy” by CIO magazine, Thomas Davenport has helped hundreds of companies revitalize their management practices. He combines his interests in research, teaching, and business management as the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology & Management at Babson College. Davenport has also taught at Harvard Business School, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and the University of Texas at Austin and has directed research centers at Accenture, McKinsey & Company, Ernst & Young, and CSC. He is also an independent Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics.

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 company's data.