Analytics must be put centre stage in decision making!

How to move to a fact-based decision-making process?

In a viewpoint on the BBC news on August 16, 2012, Stacy Blanchard (Senior director, talent and organisation, Accenture) expressed the need to have strong analytical skills to support decision making in today's volatile business environment.

Since we put the use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis to support decision making and to trigger change management a the centre stage of all our OR-AS activities, this article was simply too important and relevant to let it flow away between the many other tweets and linkedIn links.

I believe this article is relevant to a lot of people: our OR-AS customers in the first place, but also the many students at Ghent University (Commercial Engineers), MBA students at Vlerick Business School (following courses like Statistics, Decision Sciences for business, Operations Management), and many more…

Putting analytics at a central place in your company is a four-step procedure:

• Step 1. Identify the information that must be harnessed, before establishing where it resides within the business, and under whose responsibility.
• Step 2. Understand how this information can be captured effectively.
• Step 3. Find out what needs to happen to turn insights into meaningful actions for the business.
• Step 4. Create, champion and sustain a enterprise-wide analytics vision.

One of the most interesting aspect on the article for me is the following: Using analytics is not only about technological knowledge and software tools but instead, equally or even more important is a deep understanding in higher level capabilities related to model development, impactful data interpretation and how best to take advantage of analytics. These are key to establish a profound respect for data and fact-based decision-making. Glad to hear that Statistics and Decision Sciences courses are still highly relevant in today's business environment :-)!

A number of nice quotes from the article:

• "Analytical organisations are fundamentally curious" (Of course we are eager to learn!).
• "Individuals should be recognised and rewarded for their analytical capability” (I couldn't agree more!).
• "Moving to a fact-based decision making process should be planned, addressed and measured just like any other change to the business" (using ProTrack? ;-)).

Interested?

Read the full online article here or download a pdf here (copyrighted by BBC).