Overcoming roadblocks to analytics adoption

Tom Davenport and his co-authors have offered the following observation: "More than a decade after the concept of big data became part of the lexicon, only a minority of companies have become insight-driven organizations..." [1]

In using Davenport's quote about the passing of a decade, I want to ensure that we understand that analytics and analytical approaches have been around for a significant period of time—certainly longer than the decade we have been talking about "big data" for. To be clear, we are not talking about big data and we have not been talking about big data anywhere in this book.

Davenport's quote is employed here to illustrate that data and analytics have been in our orbit for far longer than a decade. Data and analytics have been with us for centuries, and only in the past decade has there been widespread recognition and interest in serious and active utilization of data and...