Publications

Gut instincts may be fine when making one's picks in the weekend football pool, but a recent survey indicates that more and more business executives plan to use analytics to help them with future corporate decisions.

by Greg Todd, Information Management Magazine, March 2, 2009

According to an Accenture survey of executives working at U.S. companies with annual revenues of $500 million or more, 68 percent believe their company has to improve their analytical capabilities to remain competitive, and more than seven in 10 say their company is working to increase its future dependence on business analytics. Similarly, nearly three quarters of these executives believe the executive leadership of their company is committed to business analytics and has a corporate strategy and distinctive capability supported by it.

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High performance IT organizations use analytics to begin to predict and influence customer behavior, product uptake, supply chains and market behavior in ways that impact the bottom line. More specifically, they can:

• Generate customer insights. This involves modeling customer behavior, identifying the most profitable customer segments, tracking loyalty and honing cross- and up sell strategies.
• Accelerate product innovation. This allows an organization to correlate market opportunity, customer requirements, R&D and service data to develop more effective products, understand market gaps and maximize the cross-sell potential of new offerings.
• Optimize the supply chain. This entails identifying key metrics for efficient planning in order to create accurate demand forecasts, optimize inventory and warehouse procurement, and create the best pricing.
• Understand financial performance. As a result, the organization can pinpoint the true drivers of positive financial performance to translate competitive knowledge into actionable strategies for maximizing revenues.