Blog Posts by Tom Davenport
Historically, organizations used analytics in situations where they had lots of internal data. The data was the outcome of well-structured, repetitive processes supported by transactional systems. If, for example, you had sold a lot of products at a lot of…
The press, consultants, and IT market research firms would have us believe that AI is the most exciting technology available today. And it is—but in part because there aren’t a lot of exciting alternatives. Blockchain isn’t turning out to be…
It seems to be inevitable. Any popular technology or approach to business change apparently has to involve a large amount of breathlessly positive media-driven hype, and then must be followed by potshots and disparagement. The positive press usually lasts for…
Modern life has been good for those who understand and can develop analytics. From sexto soccer, data and algorithms are having an increasing impact on how important decisions are made. This has led to rapidly-growing employment for those with analytical…
There have always been multiple ways of making sense of data and solving business problems with analytics. Perhaps one of the earliest classifications was the descriptive/predictive/prescriptive one, which I can’t remember whether I invented or borrowed (I feel like I…
We all have seen a shift in the companies and industries that have larger market value. The change from manufacturing to digital companies as the hot organizations has not happened overnight. Yet the speed in which they have climbed the…
When I talk with analytical professionals about artificial intelligence, many are reluctant to claim expertise in the area or bill themselves as AI practitioners. “I don’t want to appear to be just jumping on the bandwagon,” one told me recently.…
Analytics, we have often assumed, is all about modeling, statistics, and algorithms. The more generous explainers of the field would admit that it is also about data—the integration, cleaning, and massaging of it. Few, however, think first of “deployment” when…
There are a lot of skills necessary to be a successful analytics or AI leader within an organization. You’re probably familiar with them; you need quantitative skills, business acumen, tech and programming capabilities, yadda, yadda, yadda. You have heard these…