Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics

This book examines issues related to the alignment of business strategies and analytics. Vast amounts of data are being generated, collected, stored, processed, analyzed, distributed and used at an ever-increasing rate by organizations. Simultaneously, managers must rapidly and thoroughly understand the factors driving their business. Business Analytics is an interactive process of analyzing and exploring enterprise data to find valuable insights that can be exploited for competitive advantage. However, to gain this advantage, organizations need to create a sophisticated analytical climate within which strategic decisions are made. As a result, there is a growing awareness that alignment among business strategies, business structures, and analytics are critical to effectively develop and deploy techniques to enhance an organization’s decision-making capability. In the past, the relevance and usefulness of academic research in the area of alignment is often questioned by practitioners, but this book seeks to bridge this gap.

Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics: Bridging Between Theory and Practice is comprised of twelve chapters, divided into three sections. The book begins by introducing business analytics and the current gap between academic training and the needs within the business community. Chapter 2 examines how the use of cognitive computing to improve financial advice can provide value for the financial intermediary and the end consumer. Chapter 3 discusses how technology is accelerating the growth of the financial advising industry at the same time that the wealth accumulated by older generations migrates slowly to younger generations. Chapter 4 focuses on a case study of ARI, a leading fleet management company, and explores the application of advanced analytics to various facets of the industry and the company’s experience in aligning analytics with its business strategy. Chapter 5 provides the context for analytics in practice within the biopharmaceutical industry. Chapter 6 offers real-world examples of how project management professionals tackle big-data challenges in a rapidly evolving, data-rich environment. Chapter 7 explores the application of agile methodologies and principles to business analytics project delivery. Chapter 8 discusses the operational benefits that can be gained by implementing real-time, big data analytics in a healthcare setting and the concomitant influence of organizational culture on adoption of the technology. Chapter 9 provides a case study on human capital analytics and investigates if such analytics add new outlooks beyond the usual metrics used by lodging enterprises. Chapter 10 reviews the opportunities and potential shortfall influencing the impact of business intelligence and analytics services for a company’s internal use. Chapter 11 highlights how new media marketing and analytics has fostered new insights about the customer journey, such as the creation of the loyalty loop and the need for alignment in marketing strategy. Finally the book concludes with a look at how data and analytics are playing a revolutionary role in strategy development in the chemical industry.