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145 of 168 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Pointless, meandering prose
June 15, 2010
By Dr George Chua
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.
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37 of 40 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A good how-to book for adopting analytics
January 22, 2010
By James Taylor
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.
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