10 things about analytics

1.             Its not new

It has been around. In fact you could call it worlds 3^rd oldest professions. When the king said go and find out what the people want – man Friday had to do it all. Research. Surveys. Insights. Intuition. Extrapolation. Statistics. Sample size. Pattern recognition. Geography. Demographics. Psychographics.

2.             Its about intelligences.

Robert J Sternberg said that Successful intelligence = Analytical Intelligence + Creative intelligence + Practical intelligence.  Analytics can’t be just about 1/3^rd of the intelligences.  You have to bring the other factors in to.

3.             System Thinking is a given.

When it is all encompassing you have to bring the scientific discipline of Systems Thinking into everything. Multimedia. Inter-disciplinary learning.  Cross-industry insights. Multi-sensory inputs. Bio-mimicry. Systems Dynamics. A learning discipline. Like Billy Bunter would have said ‘A chap can’t think of everything.”.

4.             Creative & innovative

Big difference.  The firs word is about new, original, copyright, first-use, invention, creation, launch etc. while the second is about innovation, improvisation, adaptation, arrangement, translation, transcription.  The first is a new type of rat-trap.  The second can be a better rat-trap.

5.             Risk-Management

The risk of being wrong. Using the wrong media, the wrong technology. The down-side of smaller sample sizes. Not seeing the forest for the tree nor vice-versa. Validity. Integrity. Safety. Security. Authenticity. Originality. Infringements. Corruption. Money-laundering. Fraud.  Cooking the books, the data and cooking up everything.  Internal audit. External audit. Down-time. Business continuity. Too big too fail? Governance. Compliances. Values. Culture. All-at-risk.

6.             Don’t reinvent the wheel.

We already have it.  We still need to avoid duplication, replication, repeats, old wine in a new bottle. Its been done before. Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it. Those who spend cash seem to like doing the same. At Mckinsey they talk about MECE. Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. You have to do that with Analytics all the time.

7.             Fifth dimension or Sixth sense.

Cubing. Dicing. Warehousing. Data-mining. Relational databases. Top-down, bottom-up, drill-down any and all data, information and knowledge is being view through the prism of computers, computing and digital windows. WRONG.  What about time as a 4^th dimension? Where did it come form? Where is it going? What about insights, intuition, patter recognition, your sixth sense? 

8.             Its about gaming.

Simulation and game-theory have been around a while. Analytics in isolation means no competition nor how you use it. If you use it one way others use the same in a different way.  Counter-strategies have to be now deployed. For every analytics there is an equal and opposite counter-analytics.

9.             Management Accounting & Control Systems

MACS is extremely important.  The tobacco lobby use of data and analytics and today the government, medical or other social entities use of the same data.

10.        Command & Control

What is the purpose of all this? Analytics. Eventually decisions are taken. Tasks listed. Individual assigned. Work delegated from a central Command and Control (C&C or CnC0.  Whether global disease control, shipping logistics, eCommerce delivery, homeland security or population controls.  Ask the services – the navy, army, air-force … anything large such as Analytics requires central command & control.