Effective Operational Analytics is About More than Analytics

Many times when I speak with analytics managers or businesspeople interested in analytics, they tell me that performing some analytics on data is not the primary problem they have. "We have to get the analytics integrated with the process and the systems that support it," they say. This issue, sometimes called "operational analytics," is the most important factor in delivering business value from analytics. It's also critical to delivering value from cognitive technologies – which, in my view, are just an extension of analytics anyway. A quick aside: Someone who anticipated this issue early on was Bill Franks, the Chief Analytics Officer at Teradata. He published a book a couple of years ago called The Analytics Revolution, which is really about operational analytics.