Читать книгу AI-Enabled Analytics for Business - Lawrence S. Maisel - Страница 7

Everywhere you turn, you hear or read about artificial intelligence (AI) and the emerging importance of digital transformation. To be competitive in modern business, decision-making needs to evolve into a more objective, insightful, and unbiased process that is powered by the application of AI-enabled analytics.

We have written AI-Enabled Analytics for Business: A Roadmap for Becoming an Analytics Powerhouse for executives to gain a solid understanding of AI and analytics that will give clarity, vision, and voice to integrating them in business processes that will be impactful and increase business performance.

Today, there is more promise than practice in implementing AI and analytics for data-driven decisions. As you will learn, there are twice as many analytics failures than successes, and there are twice as many successes that are abandoned rather than sustained. The good news is that almost all failure can be traced back to executive decisions that are entirely avoidable and easily identified.

Further, AI is not the sole purview of big companies, big data, and big data projects that seek to boil the ocean. The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker can all incorporate AI to increase productivity, reduce workforce, retain higher-skilled talent, and enhance the customer's experience. In fact, AI and analytics are better done incrementally, building on each success to scale the business to become an analytics powerhouse.

Our research, training, consulting, and on-the-ground experiences with AI-enabled analytics have shaped our perspectives, refined our practices, and tested our tactics. We have worked side by side with executives like you, and our empirical results demonstrate the critical factor to success is the executive's mindset to the value of analytics and commitment to allocate the resources to building the Analytics Culture. This book gives you the Roadmap to implement AI and analytics, which, as you will learn, the executive will make or break. As we will show, failure is a choice; the good news is that it is eminently avoidable, and we have specified the steps for success.

In Part I, we cover the fundamentals of AI and analytics, beginning in Chapter 1 to untangle the many seemingly synonymous terms, partitioning tools that do and do not do analytics, and the ROI of AI. It is essential to know the difference between analysis, which is the application of arithmetic on data to yield information, and analytics, which is the application of mathematics on data to yield insights. In Chapter 2, we illuminate why analytics is essential in business and share Noble Prize-winning research that recognizes the limitations of human decision-making based on biased intuition and gut feel, and why analytics must be included as the essential unbiased component. Chapter 3 discusses myths and misconceptions regarding the approach to analytics, and Chapter 4 takes you through several applications of AI and analytics across different business functions.

In Part II, we define the Roadmap for how to implement AI-enabled analytics for data-driven decisions and the contributions of executives for becoming an analytics powerhouse. Chapter 5 is the fulcrum of this book and delivers a detailed discussion of analytics as more than a tool—it is a culture with four components: Mindset, People, Processes, and Systems. When these components are aligned, immense value to optimize performance is created, and we delineate in depth how this is accomplished. In Chapter 6, you will learn that executive action determines the successful implementation of the Analytics Culture, and you will see what executive actions are needed. Further, we introduce the Analytics Champion, who supports the executive and delivers the tactical implementation of the Analytics Culture. In Chapter 7, we specify with clarity and simplicity how to implement analytics and show that achieving it is not time-consuming, hard, or expensive—it is a discipline. Chapter 8 links analytics to strategic decisions and debuts the new and innovative Analytics Scorecard, which elevates the traditional and subjective Business Scorecard into a quantitative cause-and-effect delineation of strategies that can drive increased business performance.

In Part III, we present specific use cases that illustrate key themes and confirm our approach and insights conveyed in earlier chapters. As there is more to learn from failure than success, Chapter 9 discusses instances across several industries where analytics successes became failures. Chapter 10 tells the story of a hospitality company's analytics proof of concept that yielded optimized staffing while maintaining excellent customer service, significant cost savings, and opportunities to boost revenue and profit—yet failed because the senior executive did not believe in investing in analytics. Chapter 11 is the story of achieving insights that incrementally progress toward a data-driven culture from analytics in demand planning and supply chain. Finally, Chapter 12 puts an exclamation point on the notion that AI and analytics are for everyone, not just big companies, through the story of a medium-size art museum and its CFO's curiosity, which led to learning about analytics and discovering how it provides insights.

For your convenience, we have also included an appendix for the Analytics Champion that will guide the executive in selecting the right person and provide the Champion with skillsets and tools needed for implementing the first analytics project and scaling the Analytics Culture.

An executive's job is to manage risk, not avoid it. Yet many executives are too risk-averse and choose not to make decisions because the risk of failure blinds them to see the opportunity for success. While information is nearly always imperfect, employing AI and analytics gives vision to the future that mitigates risk for better decision-making. This book is for you, the executive and aspiring executive, to arm you with the knowledge to lead your organization to become an analytics powerhouse.

With this introduction, we welcome you to the Undiscovered Country—the future!