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

A tool for augmenting human capacities

Although computers may never become sentient, they can do many things better than humans can — and humans can certainly do many more things better than computers are able to do. This is not an either/or discussion. This is a fact.

Computers are good at repetition because they do not get bored or lose focus. As such, they excel at scanning and evaluating massive amounts of information. They do not lose interest and will evaluate the same or similar input datasets as many times as directed to do so, and they will not complain that the task is repetitive, boring, or seemingly pointless. Indeed, computers can routinely perform brute-force repetition of tasks so swiftly that when scaled up to billions of operations per second, it may seem like human cognition – but it is not. What these countless calculations can do, though, is enable computers to perform impressive feats, accessing large amounts of information, comparing billions...