Speaking at SAS's Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas, an invitation-only event for senior executives, Davis questioned whether there is "a vendor or supplier out there today that doesn't have analytics.""

"Everybody has analytics," he said. But what they are actually offering in terms of analytic capacity in support of solving business problems remains in question.

"So you bring all the data together and you put it in some form in which the end user can gain access to it, but what are you doing with it?" he asked.

There are eight levels of analytics, according to Davis. The first four encompass what he considers "the classic definition of business intelligence" and what the majority of organizations are actually doing.

What the first four levels all have in common is that they look at past activity, Davis pointed out. "They support reactive decision-making ... understanding the facts after things occurred and now reacting," he said.