Analytics Life Cycle

Whether it's Business Analytics or Cost Analytics such as Activity-Based Costing, modeling and analysis are just the beginning and render no value unless followed through the entire Analytics Life Cycle.

The Secret Origins of Corporate Strategy

Transcribed portion of Harvard Business Review IdeaCast
http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2010/03/the-secret-origins-of-corporat.html

HBR Host: "There is an open question as to whether these kinds of thought leaders really add value to a business."

Walter Kiechel: "Well, if you believe that it's important for a business to have the facts, and if you believe that it's important for a business to be able to recognize patterns, to know what's happening to them and how their business works, then I think it's pretty tough to dismiss the role that consultants can play in helping a company out."

Walter Kiechel is the author of The Lords of Strategy.

Analytic Management is Impeded by Common Organizational Pathologies:

• A powerful conventional wisdom, often associated with powerful people, is allowed to sustain itself absent critical testing.

• Decision making, especially at high levels, not only fails to demand rigor and dispassionate analysis, but often champions the opposite as the scarce talent that identifies CEOs and visionaries from otherwise smart but less inspired people.

• The organization lacks people who get up in the morning eager to do analytic empirical work and are really good at it. Instead, analytic work is seen as the last resort, undertaken by those unfamiliar with proper methods.

• People tend to win over ideas rather than the reverse.

In "Competing on Analytics - The New Science of Winning",
by Thomas H. Davenport & Jeanne G. Harris