Competing on Analytics: Updated, with a New Introduction

INTRODUCTION

FOUR ERAS IN TEN YEARS

A REVOLUTION IN ANALYTICS

The world of extracting insights from data was relatively stable for its first thirty years or so. There were certainly technological advances, but the act of creating a bar chart or running a regression analysis didn’t change much. An analyst in 1977 submitted the analysis program and the data to a computer on a deck of punched paper cards; the analyst in 2005 submitted it from a keyboard. But the other details were pretty similar.

Since the turn of the millennium, however, the pace of change has accelerated markedly. If we call the way that business intelligence and analytics were practiced before 2007 “Analytics 1.0,” we’ve seen the advent of 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 in the ten years ...