What does the future of analytical competition hold? Davenport: We tried to break that issue up into several different categories. There are the strategic drivers, human drivers and technological drivers. From the strategic side, more and more companies will start to view this as a critical capability that they'll need to have and what does the long term competition look like with respect to analytics.
The airline industry was pioneers with analytics with things like yield management and crew scheduling, but they coasted on their reputations a bit and suffered. Capital One is competing in a credit card market where lots of banks have adopted their approaches. So they have to constantly be thinking about how they can introduce analytics to (other) areas of banking or other innovative approaches they can take.
The real issue is that there's going to be an analytical talent race. There already is to some extent. One software company told us it can take up to a year to find someone who understands the nature of their business and has strong analytical capabilities. It will be interesting to see if more of this work goes offshore. There are lots of smart people in India and China, for example. But there are trust issues with having someone handling your data who's located thousands of miles away.
Harris: Analytics will also be used to differentiate products and offerings, such as Progressive Insurance offering customers the opportunity to evaluate competitors' quotes. There are golf clubs under development that can analyze your swing and provide you biometric feedback.
What might IT managers learn from the book? Davenport: I think they might have a much greater sense of what the business value of BI might be. The discussion has often been around things like 'Should you have a data warehouse or a series of data marts?' IT had a tough time getting senior executives motivated to pay for and move forward on this, so this should be a nice way for IT people to engage senior management on the business value of analytics.