Читать книгу The Sentient Enterprise - Ratzesberger Oliver - Страница 5

Data is driving progress across all kinds of industries, but too many people – from analysts and business users to top C-suite decision makers – still don’t know enough about how to innovate with it.

A few decades ago, this was enough rationale for most information technology (IT) leaders to dole out resources to the rest of their company colleagues through a stately and slow requirements-driven process. Sometimes that approach is still necessary. But in a world where every home, pocket, and purse has countless real-time and self-service apps, many companies are embarrassingly behind the curve in making data and analytic muscle more accessible to the diverse workforce that needs these resources to innovate.

On an organizational level, failing to leverage data for innovation and decision support can put your whole business on a downward trajectory. Success today requires navigating a constantly expanding data universe, and companies that don’t fully embrace the data available to them are operating on borrowed time.

We’ll explore in this book how the five-stage Sentient Enterprise capability maturity model can put data in the hands of more business users, part of a broader revolution into how companies listen to data, conduct analysis, and make autonomous decisions at massive scale in real time. In the process, we’ll visit with top analytics professionals at some of today’s largest and most successful organizations – Verizon, Dell, Cisco, General Motors (GM), Wells Fargo, and Siemens, just to name a few – to see how this revolution has, in many ways, already begun.

“We remind ourselves every day – it’s even in our Company Credo – that being big is not the same as being the best,” said Grace Hwang, Executive Director for Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics at Verizon Wireless, one of the top executives who gave extensive interviews for the writing of this book. “Our job is to leverage economy of scale – but at the same time to be nimble and proactive.”

In the pages to come, we’ve packed lots of real-world perspective from Verizon and other influential companies that have agreed to share their stories – their headaches and challenges, their insights and solutions – as they innovate their way to success. Throughout this book, in fact, we prioritize on-the-ground relevance and accessibility for a wide range of readers.

We’ve designed this book to be accessible and succinct for the lay business audience, with plenty of bread crumbs for more technophile information. While we are indeed talking about capabilities made possible by servers, nodes, data warehouses, and the skein of other infrastructure and software resources that go into any large analytics infrastructure, we do so from a perspective that’s not too wonky or overly technical.