Book Image

Analytics: How to Win with Intelligence

By : John Thompson, Shawn P. Rogers
Book Image

Analytics: How to Win with Intelligence

By: John Thompson, Shawn P. Rogers

Overview of this book

Today, business is moving into an era where information is more valuable than services. Organizations that connect information with their products will have a huge advantage. This book helps people understand the power of data analytics and explains how some of the tools available can be applied to a wide range of applications. It begins with a brief history of analytics and explains how it all began. You'll learn about several common analytical approaches and the tools that data scientists use to analyze data. You'll gain insight into some staffing models, technologies, organizational structures, and analytical approaches used in the previous two eras of analytics. As you progress through the chapters, you'll also get a glimpse into the future of the analytical marketplace. After reading this book, you will be able to help your team deploy analytical elements into your operations and become competitive in your business.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Foreword by Tom Davenport

Chapter 9
Innovative or Icky?

“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”
– Margaret Heffernan

How much do businesses know about us? When it comes to a company like Target, the answer is: quite a lot.1 For many of its customers, the giant retailer knows their age, whether they’re married, if they have children, where they live, their estimated salary, whether they’ve moved recently, what websites they may have visited, and so on. The company can also buy data to learn even more about its customers, including their ethnicity, their job history, the magazines they read, their political leanings, what they talk about online, and more.

All this information coupled with sophisticated analytics can be a powerful tool, enabling Target to determine, for example, when some of its customers might be pregnant. The company might then mail those women various coupons for maternity clothes, cribs, strollers...