The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics (Wiley and SAS Business Series) - Hardcover

May, Thornton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470461713 ISBN 13: 9780470461716

Verlag: Wiley, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Learn to manage and grow successful analytical teams within your business

Examining analytics-one of the hottest business topics today-The New KNOW argues that analytics is needed by all enterprises in order to be successful. Until now, enterprises have been required to know what happened in the past, but in today's environment, your organization is expected to have a good knowledge of what happens next.

This innovative book covers

• Where analytics live in the enterprise
• The value of analytics
• Relationships betwixt and between
• Technologies of analytics
• Markets and marketers of analytics

The New KNOW is a timely, essential resource to staying competitive in your field.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thornton May knows knowing. His work on the complex intersection of the informational, knowledge, and behavioral components of organizational change includes teaching at distinguished business schools, writing for widely read technology magazines, futuring at think tanks, and keeping in monthly contact with more than 1,000 C-level executives.

May specializes in creating collaborative knowledge places, postindustrial campfires where the best and brightest convene to understand what they know, what they don't know, and what they can do about it. He currently engages executives at organizations such as the CIO Executive Summit (Evanta/DMG Group), the Multi-Channel Value Lab (Digital River), the Olin Innovation Lab (Olin College of Engineering), and the Value Studio at Florida State College at Jacksonville.

The editors at eWeek magazine acknowledged May as one of the "100 Most Influential People in IT." The editors at Fast Company consider him one of the "50 best brains in business."

Thornton May received his BA from Dartmouth College and his MSIA from Carnegie-Mellon University. He did doctoral work in Japanese studies at the University of Michigan and Keio University in Tokyo.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Praise for The New Know
Innovation Powered by Analytics

"Human history reflects our long―and by no means completed―ascent from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge. Thornton illuminates the knowledge explosion which itself is a critical part of what we must know next."―Alvin Toffler, author and futurist

"Be forewarned: reading Thornton May's The New Know will make you think you've spent your whole life in Plato's cave, staring at shadows on the wall. But do not despair: Thornton will take you by the hand and guide you into the sunlight. There, you'll understand that we are bobbing in an ever expanding ocean of data, and that learning to analyze it is critically important―like learning to swim."―Lew Hay, Chairman and CEO of FPL Group, the nation's No. 1 producer of renewable energy from wind and solar power

Understand the critical competency of the age: business analytics

Today's high-performing organizations are dealing with diverse issues, a wider range of regulations, and heightened global competition.

So with all these issues, why embrace business analytics? Easy . . .

• The rules have changed

• Customer expectations have changed

• Regulatory expectations have changed

• Societal expectations have changed

• Performance expectations have changed

• Possibilities have changed

Futurist and leading IT communicator Thornton May makes a convincing case for why organizations need to find innovative ways to exploit technology and operate consistently better than their competitors.

We are standing at a hinge of history, on the cusp of entering a new age―the age of The New Know, an age when just showing up is not enough.

Both a time period and a social reality, The New Know is all about moving your organization beyond just having the data, to knowing what you need to know and when you need to know it.

Aus dem Klappentext

The big contemporary headline-grabbing news today is the aftershock and post-meltdown anguish regarding what senior executives did not know about this fraud or that risk, those employees, that cash flow, their carbon footprint, and, not surprisingly, all those customers.

The next big story, the headlines you and your team will be creating after reading premier IT communicator and futurist Thornton May's new book, The New Know, will be all about what can be known, what must be known, and, most important, what actions you will take because you know. This is the power of business analytics.

Revealing the analytics community as never before, May builds upon years of fieldwork to bring us a fascinating look at this community, which does important, exciting work affecting every aspect of your organization's life. This is a book about people you should know―and know about.

The first vernacular ethnographic and anthropological study of the analytics community, The New Know provides a map to the universe of analytics and puts the spotlight on the substantive and courageous work analysts do to make your company a better place.

This visionary book covers:

• What the art, act, and science of knowing really is

• The professionals at the beating heart of business analytics

• How the rapid rise in data, the brisk expansion of tools, and maturation of information management processes are changing various vertical markets

• How analytics creates measurable value

• How innovation happens in complex organizations today

While data analysis has been used in business since the dawn of the industrial era, number crunching was left largely to the statisticians. Celebrating the tools, processes, people, and practices of business analytics, The New Know reveals how to create information-based competitive advantage.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The New Know

Innovation Powered by AnalyticsBy Thornton May

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-46171-6

Chapter One

The Art, Act, and Science of Knowing

From the Dark Ages (ca. 476 to 1000 A.D.), during the Renaissance (ca. fourteenth through seventeenth centuries), at the center of the Age of Reason/Age of Enlightenment (ending ca.1800), and right on up through the Industrial and Information ages, the history of humans has been one of ever-increasing knowledge. Wanting to know and eliminating not knowing is a big part of the history of our species. We have spent 1,000-plus years seeking to eliminate ignorance.

Why are Humans at the Top of the Food Chain?

Have you ever wondered why humans sit on the top of the global food chain? If we did the classic SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) for humans vis--vis other animals, our species would come up short on just about every dimension. Humans are at the top of the food chain because of our capacity to know. Our eyesight is not exceptional. We possess no ability to see the ultraviolet light that guides butterflies. We have none of the night vision that aids owls and ocelots. We cannot see as far as eagles. We have none of the echolocation by which bats and whales hunt and orient. We are olfactorally challenged, having a very primitive sense of smell. We cannot run as fast as the antelope or swim as well as the dolphin; nor do we possess the strength of the lion. So why aren't we lunch?

Mythology tells us that Epimetheus-whose very name evokes lack of foresight-forgot the human species when it came to doling out features and functions. By the time deeper-thinking deities arrived, it was too late: While other animals were well provided for, humans stood naked and defenseless. In desperation, Prometheus stole from the gods the tools of fire and crafts and gave them to humanity. Whatever the reason, humans are, by nature, deprived of natural qualities. Other animals are naturally equipped to survive. Humans owe their survival to empirical, technical, and moral knowledge, which they acquire progressively. The trait that separates us from the lower orders, the thing that generates our interspecies competitive advantage, and the behavior that places us at the top of the food chain is our ability to know.

Recent History of Knowing

The Information Revolution did not start with the Internet. Alfred D. Chandler, the respected business historian at the Harvard Business School, argues that Americans have been on the information highway for at least 300 years. My former boss, futurist Alvin Toffler, was one of the first to situate the Information Revolution in relation to the long waves of history. William Wolman, editor at BusinessWeek, and Anna Colamosca believe that "by endowing libraries across the country, Andrew Carnegie created an earlier knowledge revolution in the United States whose scope at least matches that of the information revolution created by Bill Gates and his competitors." Tom Standage, science and technology writer at The Guardian, business editor at The Economist, and author of The Victorian Internet weighs in:

Today, we are repeatedly told that we are in the midst of a communications revolution. But the electric telegraph was, in many ways, far more disconcerting for the inhabitants of the time than today's advances are for us. If any generation has the right to claim that it bore the full bewildering, world-shrinking brunt of such a revolution, it is not us-it is our 19th century forbears.

The nineteenth century was a great age for facts but not necessarily a great age for understanding what the facts actually meant or for acting efficaciously. Charles Dickens's Mr. Gradgrind, the notorious headmaster in the novel Hard Times, has become a symbol for the excesses of out-of-context, fact-based reasoning: "What I want is facts.... Facts alone are wanted in life." What is wanted in life today is not just facts but the meaning of what the interrelationships of those facts mean.

Collecting or moving information around certainly is not new. Humans have been attempting to extract insight from rudimentary data sets for a very long time. Sara Igo at Princeton University tells us that gathering social statistics "useful for governing" goes way back: "Rulers have counted, administered, and made 'legible' populations for military service and taxation stretching back at least as far as William the Conqueror's Domesday Book of 1086."

The knowledge industry is changing. In my periodic role as a professor, I am perpetually attempting to convince students that the reason we are going through the learning exercise is not for the grade, it is for the future period action that the knowledge imparted during class enables (which may or may not have something to do with the letter grade received). I. I. Rabi, a great man at the great Columbia physics department (he received his Nobel Prize in 1944 for finding a method of measuring the magnetic properties of nuclei), is remembered for his science, his many kindnesses, and a famous quote: "If you decide you don't have to get As, you can learn an enormous amount in college."

The path to knowledge is changing. Outside of America, access to knowledge has been quite a structured thing.

In South Africa ... I had waited obediently year after year to get to the level at which "they" would begin to teach "me" the things I was able to handle. It has never occurred to me that I could learn what I wanted when I chose. In America, I was alarmed to see students who set about learning things on their own. I'm still embarrassed to admit to myself that I almost never studied anything I wasn't officially taught.

The Internet makes self-teaching-and lifelong learning-the rule rather than the exception.

Historians ultimately will come to consensus on what to call the time period between the frenzy that was the dot-com bubble and the period before society finally enters the data cloud. For want of a better phrase, I call the 20-year interregnum we currently inhabit (1995-2015) the Age of Little Information. I come to this label not because the age exhibits a lack of information. Quite the contrary, it is during this epoch that information-previously locked away in analog form-is becoming widely digitized.

The New Know has changed our reality along 10 fundamental dimensions.

New Know Reality #1: You Will Be Expected to Do Something with Information

All this newly digitized information has had, relatively speaking, little impact on behavior and little impact on organizational outcomes. Shareholders learned recently that digitized information does not necessarily mean managed and/or acted-on information. We are now exiting a historical moment of undermanaged and only occasionally acted-upon information to an environment requiring much more active, much more intense, much more aggressive information management. You as an executive will be held much more accountable for your data management behaviors. You will be expected to transform "data lead" into "knowledge gold" via the expeditious sensemaking leading to efficacious action. In the Age of Little Information, we were data vegetarians. In the New Know we will have to become information and knowledge carnivores.

Perhaps the thing that sets the New Know most apart from...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0470461713
• ISBN 13: 9780470461716
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland