Analytics is the New Source of Competitive Advantage

Have been saying this for a long time.  And people agree.  But its also the 'how' thats important.  Will it be the old way of getting data, analyzing, then selling it to management.  Or deeply embedding in process as a form of integrated intelligence? 

Analytics is the New Source of Competitive Advantage  By Han Yang in Cisco Blog

Analytics is the new source of competitive advantage.  Thomas H. Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning,  has been writing about analytics for over 10 years.  Unfortunately, even when I attended Cisco Live Barcelona a few weeks ago, many customers from IT are still confused about why their line of business data scientists focusing on analytics are making seemingly strange requests of the IT department.  Ranging from high data ingestion rates to GPUs for deep learning, IT leaders are not fully comprehending the rapidly changing requests coming from their line of business counterparts.  Furthermore, IT requirements made in one week are often changed depending on what data scientists have uncovered during the following week.

At the end of the day, data scientists are embarking an adventure of data discovery, no different than Christopher Columbus trying to uncover a shorter route to India.  They are literally diving into the data and uncovering gems as well as garbage.  During this adventure of discovery, the tools that they need change as well depending on what new facts, data sources, and insights have made along the way.  As a result, IT requirements in supporting the data scientists change as well.  A Harvard Business Review article pointed out that big data analytics projects are driven by experiment and discovery.  Hence, the IT requirements are fluid and constantly changing.  ... "