Competing on Analytics

This article on Competing on Analytics in DM Review caught my eye today. In it Jim Ericson discusses a report by Tom Davenport on using analytics for competition. While some of the aspects of competition that they discuss driving analytically are suitable targets for "traditional" BI (like M&A), some really require moving beyond that to what I call Enterprise Decision Management. Companies need to build a decisioning backbone that not only automates key customer-facing, high-volume transactions but allows them to compete by adding analytics to this backbone.

"Among the leaders, Davenport has identified common traits: strong senior executive advocacy of analysis and fact based solutions; the use of predictive modeling and complex optimization techniques; analytic approaches across multiple functions or processes; and movement toward an enterprise level analytical strategy."

Clearly to deliver predictive models across multiple processes as part of an enterprise strategy you need a technology backbone for managing these analytically-improved decisions across your enterprise - an Enterprise Decision Management platform.