How the smartest organizations are embedding analytics to transform insights into action

Download the complete IBM Institute for Business Value study (602KB)

In every industry, in every part of the world, senior leaders wonder whether they are getting full value from the massive amounts of information their organizations already have. New technologies collect more data than ever before, yet many organizations still seek better ways to obtain value from their data and compete in the marketplace.

Knowing what happened and why it happened are no longer adequate. Leaders need to know what is happening now, what is likely to happen next and, what actions they should take for optimal results.

To help organizations understand the opportunity of information and advanced analytics, the MIT Sloan Management Review partnered with the IBM Institute for Business Value to conduct a survey of nearly 3,000 executives, managers and analysts working across more than 30 industries and 100 countries. The findings led to recommendations addressing different pieces of the information-and-analytics value puzzle:

• Focus on the biggest and highest value opportunities
• Within each opportunity, start with questions, not data
• Embed insights to drive actions and deliver value
• Keep existing capabilities while adding new ones
• Use an information agenda to plan for the future.

It takes big plans followed by discrete actions to gain the benefits of analytics. For analytics-driven insights to be consumed – that is, to trigger new actions across the organization – they must be closely linked to business strategy, easy for end users to understand, and embedded into organizational processes to take action at the right time.

Success with business analytics requires more than the data and algorithms. It requires a company culture committed to using information for breakthrough ideas and operations.

A new paper from IBM, “Breaking away with business analytics and optimization: New intelligence meets enterprise operations” (PDF, 1.2MB), reveals three ways that the most successful companies are taking action when they deploy business analytics. Based on a recent study of business leaders, it is clear that higher performing organizations have these differentiating characteristics:

• Higher performers are challenging. They excel in disrupting the status quo, creating an environment more receptive to innovation, and bolder in its application of new insights and intelligence.
• Higher performers are anticipating. They’re better at predicting and preparing in advance by evaluating business outcomes and trade-offs proactively in pursuit of new objectives.
• Higher performers are empowering. They give employees authority to use information, make decisions and act on their insights to drive change.