This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Differentiate Your Analytics
Businesses strive to create competitive differentiation through a combination of products, customer service, and operational processes that are delivered to the market. Analytics can simply support each independent activity by delivering comparable insights as realized by competitors. Or they can be used to highly differentiate your competitive strategy. That could mean being a first mover—the first or on the leading edge of using analytics in your industry—or it could mean distinguishing your analytic approach or the speed at which you deploy your analytics into a production environment.
Many firms look around the marketplace and try to learn from their competitive landscape. However, that copycat approach typically means settling for a secondary position in the market rather than a leading position. Instead, analytic leaders look at other industries and how they’re using analytics. They draw analogies between problems from other industries and the problems in their business. They discover how other companies are using analytics to solve their problems. They start to look for new data and approaches outside the four walls of their organization. They forge new symbiotic alliances to obtain data and methods that benefit their organization. They apply the new knowledge to problems in their industry or business. To do this, they look beyond the silo of their own team, department, or location. They look for opportunities to integrate with other data and processes to build an analytic solution with a broader impact for the organization. They remove the constraints they’ve lived with and find new ways to inspire innovative analytics. They use the full breadth and combination of available analytics—not just what they’ve always used—to drive game-changing value. They don’t just create predictions; they use their predictive model to systematically perform at their best by optimizing the predictive model to prescribe the best course of action. This relentlessly drives the best course of action—day in and day out—to help them achieve their competitive differentiation.