Forbes on The Data Analytics Boom

A multitude of converging facts has given rise to numbers-based decision-making.

In "Analytics Goes Mainstream" I explained why numbers-driven decision making is being used so widely now. Perhaps as interesting as the range of its application are the many converging reasons for the rise of interest in analytics. Here are nine, from perhaps a multitude of others.

1. Total quality management and six-sigma programs trained a generation of production managers to value rigorous application of data. ...

2. Quantitative finance applied ideas from operations research, physics, biology, supply chain management and elsewhere to problems of money and markets.

3. As Eric Schmidt said in August, we now create in two days as much information as humanity did from the beginning of recorded history until 2003.

4. ... Moore's Law and its corollaries (such as Kryder's Law of hard disks) are creating a computational fabric which enables that data to be processed more cost-effectively than ever before.

5. After the reengineering/ERP push, the Internet boom and the largely-failed effort to make services-oriented architectures a business development theme, vendors are putting major weight behind analytics.

6. Despite all the money spent on ERP, on data warehousing and on "real-time" systems, most managers still cannot fully trust their data.

7. Related to this lack of confidence in enterprise data, risk awareness is on the rise in many sectors.

8. Data from across domains can be correlated through such ready identifiers as GPS location, credit reporting, cellphone number or even Facebook identity

9. Visualization is improving.

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