At a “Competing on Business Analytics” event sponsored by SAS and Accenture in Chicago this week, Mike Haaf, former Food Lion SVP of Sales, Marketing, and Business Strategy, described a broad and successful program of analytical marketing and operations at the Carolina-based grocery retailer. When Haaf arrived at the company in 2003, its performance was [...]
Business intelligence–and its predecessor concepts decision support, executive information systems, and so forth–have been circulating for several decades in business. However, I don’t think it’s ever fully worked. What we’ve done is to throw data (often in the form of difficult-to-navigate data warehouses) and software tools at business users, and said “Go at it.” That’s [...]
From Tom Davenport’s article in the February issue of Harvard Business Review, “How to Design Smart Business Experiments“: Every day, managers in your organization take steps to implement new ideas without having any real evidence to back them up. They fiddle with offerings, try out distribution approaches, and alter how work gets done, usually acting [...]
