Introduction

This book is intended for senior managers and executives who are contemplating or have made the commitment to hire and manage a team of individuals with the stated purpose of designing, building, and implementing applications and systems based on advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. If you believe that this objective can be accomplished in a year or less and can be achieved cheaply, do not buy this book. You should stop reading, cancel your current plans, and save your money.

Making a commitment to drive your organization to a higher level of effectiveness and efficiency is what you are doing. Just as if you were deciding to build a state-of-the-art factory or if you and your team were entering into a completely new market or geographic region of the world – if you do not have a multiyear view, then you should seriously reconsider undertaking this journey.

In this introductory section, we will walk through the process of succeeding in the analytics...