Can game changing analytics help your business?

Dave Stevinson, vice president at GNR Advanced Analytics, talks about the opportunities and expectations in business.

I wanted to share with you some ideas the channel can take from Moneyball, the book by Michael Lewis that became a major film starring Brad Pitt.

The premise of the book is that the collected wisdom of baseball’s experts is inherently subjective and thus essentially flawed. The book demonstrates how a baseball team facing bankruptcy managed to outperform rivals with unlimited funds by being smarter at critical decisions. This seemingly impossible feat was achieved by using detailed analytics, to find undervalued players based on a series of new metrics, that became game changing and in time the new norm.

To use a football analogy, a team managed to use analytics to get Watford FC to the same league position as Manchester United – thus creating a new way to play the ‘game’. Let us see how this can work for you.

The big question – can game changing analytics help your business? Introducing new measurements, insights and views on the data in real time, incorporating both big data and predictive analytics capability, and we can easily understand where the opportunities and exceptions are hiding.

Agility is key: top staff deserve the right tools so that they can see all of their data all of the time, to make better, more timely decisions to exploit opportunity and manage exceptions. Here are three tips:

1) Change your culture. Focus on solving the problem with data, do not get distracted by the problem.

2) Choose your measures. Create a basis to make objective decisions, not subjective decisions. Unless you can prove it with data, do not allow the decision.

3) Change behaviour for the basis on how you make decisions. Empower your knowledge workers to make decisions and become more agile, managing by exception.

Challenging times are a constant, and intelligent business decisions can easily make the difference between success and failure. With today’s decision-makers so busy, how do you give them clear, actionable insights? The answer lies in your data – the challenge is to have the right tools and then to ask the right questions quickly enough to get meaningful answers out.

You can outperform your competition as long as the data drives the decision.