Conclusion
This chapter provided an overview of analytics systems that have been widely deployed in a range of functional areas: marketing/sales, financial services, logistics/supply chain, manufacturing, and fraud/theft.
Currently, various initiatives are being planned and implemented to advance the state of the art in each of these areas, as well as in many other functional departments not mentioned above, including R&D and human resources.
Our recent conversations with business leaders and senior managers in a number of industries indicate that many companies have already been expanding their capabilities considerably with respect to how data is acquired, managed, integrated, and exploited with advanced analytics throughout the different organizational functions. Indeed, in the words of the writer William Gibson, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed yet.”8
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