“Where do we want to be in five years as a result of advanced analytics? What are the implications to our business model, culture, portfolio mix, and value proposition?” CEOs all over the world are asking these questions—for good reason. Analytics has the potential to upend the prevailing business models in many industries, and CEOs are struggling to understand how. The need is urgent."

McKinsey "Advanced analytics: Nine insights from the C-suite"

Practical insights from CEOs - recommended reading in full article linked below. Key points

  1. Surprisingly few companies know where and how analytics can create value
  2. Data Science the easy part- getting the right data ready for analyses is much more difficult
  3. Connect the data strategy to the analytics strategy
  4. Data ownership and access needs to be democtratised
  5. Embedding analytics as much about change management as about data science
  6. Design of analytics solutions needs to be user lead
  7. Learn to love metrics and measure, measure and measure
  8. The analytics operating model should be consistent with the business model.


Key therefore is access to the right data and much of that is unstructured.  See "Lighting up dark Data"

See Tools to change that to semi-structured and analyzable are critical. Tools such as 360Insight.

The other critical success factor?

Unless analytics is embedded in workflows and therefore relevant to every user across an enterprise such projects are doomed to failure

See "BI- Embedded or not?"