Aligning Business Strategies And Analytics

This book examines issues related to the alignment of business strategies and analytics. Vast amounts of data are being generated, collected, stored, processed, analyzed, distributed and used at an ever-increasing rate by organizations. Simultaneously, managers must rapidly and thoroughly understand the factors driving their business. Business Analytics is an interactive process of analyzing and exploring enterprise data to find valuable insights that can be exploited for competitive advantage. However, to gain this advantage, organizations need to create a sophisticated analytical climate within which strategic decisions are made. As a result, there is a growing awareness that alignment among business strategies, business structures, and analytics are critical to effectively develop and deploy techniques to enhance an organization’s decision-making capability. In the past, the relevance and usefulness of academic research in the area of alignment is often questioned by practitioners, but this book seeks to bridge this gap. Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics: Bridging Between Theory and Practice is comprised of twelve chapters, divided into three sections. The book begins by introducing business analytics and the current gap between academic training and the needs within the business community. Chapters 2 - 5 examines how the use of cognitive computing improves financial advice, how technology is accelerating the growth of the financial advising industry, explores the application of advanced analytics to various facets of the industry and provides the context for analytics in practice. Chapters 6 - 9 offers real-world examples of how project management professionals tackle big-data challenges, explores the application of agile methodologies, discusses the operational benefits that can be gained by implementing real-time, and a case study on human capital analytics. Chapters 10 - 11 reviews the opportunities and potential shortfall and highlights how new media marketing and analytics fostered new insights. Finally the book concludes with a look at how data and analytics are playing a revolutionary role in strategy development in the chemical industry.

In order to establish and maintain a successful company in the digital age, managers are digitally transforming their organizations to include such tools as disruptive technologies and digital data to improve performance and efficiencies. As these companies continue to adopt digital technologies to improve their businesses and create new revenues and value-producing opportunities, they must also be aware of the challenges digitalization can present. Business Transformations in the Era of Digitalization is a collection of innovative research on the latest trends, business opportunities, and challenges in the digitalization of businesses. Highlighting a range of topics including business-IT alignment, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), business sustainability, small and medium-sized enterprises, and digital entrepreneurship, this book is ideally designed for managers, professionals, consultants, entrepreneurs, and researchers.

Defining business alignment as the process of “ensuring that a new project, program, or process is connected directly to business impact measures, usually expressed in terms such as output, quality, cost, or time,” 10 Steps to Successful Business Alignment offers concrete input, detailed suggestions, and pragmatic know-how on how to plan for, implement, and maintain effective alignment for projects of nearly every size and scope. Written by a pair of renowned experts in the field of business measurement and evaluation, 10 Steps to Successful Business Alignment shows how to connect projects to business measures, and how to maintain alignment with those measures throughout a project’s entire life cycle. This book covers the full spectrum of issues related to alignment, including planning the alignment with clients; determining payoff, business, performance, and preference needs; addressing high-level objectives; measuring impact; reporting the results of the alignment; and more. In providing both a conceptual framework as well as nuts-and-bolts information on how to achieve meaningful, effective alignment, some of the topics on which this volume drills down into useful specifics include: how and when to discuss alignment with clients which projects are (and which projects aren’t) appropriate for applying alignment the proper ways to clarify and manage expectations of the alignment process best practices for addressing the needs of a project and the related alignment program a discussion of the factors that contribute to the success of alignment how to achieve buy-in on alignment from stakeholders in a project a detailed, highly objective review of how to measure the impact of alignment why isolating the impact of alignment process is crucial the most effective ways to report and communicate your results. Truly a comprehensive resource on alignment, 10 Steps to Successful Business Alignment delivers practical insight on every step of the alignment process, and is essential reading for every professional involved in creating, maintaining, and verifying alignment.

Strategic analytics is a relatively new field in conjunction with strategic management and business intelligence. Generally, the strategic management field deals with the enhancement of the decision-making capabilities of managers. Typically, such decision-making processes are heavily dependent upon various internal and external reports. Managers need to develop their strategies using clear strategy processes supported by the increasing availability of data. This situation calls for a different approach to strategy, including integration with analytics, as the science of extracting value from data and structuring complex problems. Using Strategy Analytics to Measure Corporate Performance and Business Value Creation discusses how to tackle complex business dynamics using optimization techniques and modern business analytics tools. It covers not only introductory concepts of strategic analytics but also provides strategic analytics applications in each area of management such as market dynamics, customer analysis, operations, and people management. It unveils the best industry practices and how managers can become expert strategists and analysts to better measure and enhance corporate performance and their businesses. This book is ideal for analysts, executives, managers, entrepreneurs, researchers, students, industry professionals, stakeholders, practitioners, academicians, and others interested in the strategic analytics domain and how it can be applied to complex business dynamics.

What difference can the aspiring HR strategist really make to business value? In the new and extensively updated edition of her ground-breaking book, Linda Holbeche answers this question and provides the tools and insights to help HR managers and directors add value to the organization by implementing effective HR initiatives that are aligned to core business strategies. This edition includes new chapters, fresh case questions, specific sector ‘twists’ like healthcare, the university sector, travel and tourism, alongside a greater mix of international case studies. Taking a more analytical approach than previous works, Holbeche discusses and explores a number of contemporary academic debates. Learn how you can strengthen and prove the relationship between people strategy and business success through your approach to performance and development and impress at the highest levels with this new edition of an HR classic.

"While business analytics sounds like a complex subject, this book provides a clear and non-intimidating overview of the topic. Following its advice will ensure that your organization knows the analytics it needs to succeed, and uses them in the service of key strategies and business processes. You too can go beyond reporting!"—Thomas H. Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of IT and Management, Babson College; coauthor, Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results Deliver the right decision support to the right people at the right time Filled with examples and forward-thinking guidance from renowned BA leaders Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund, Business Analytics for Managers offers powerful techniques for making increasingly advanced use of information in order to survive any market conditions. Take a look inside and find: Proven guidance on developing an information strategy Tips for supporting your company's ability to innovate in the future by using analytics Practical insights for planning and implementing BA How to use information as a strategic asset Why BA is the next stepping-stone for companies in the information age today Discussion on BA's ever-increasing role Improve your business's decision making. Align your business processes with your business's objectives. Drive your company into a prosperous future. Taking BA from buzzword to enormous value-maker, Business Analytics for Managers helps you do it all with workable solutions that will add tremendous value to your business.

The Harvard Business Review Paperback series gives managers and professionals the information they need to stay competitive in a fast-moving world. From preeminent thinkers whose work has defined an entire field to rising stars who are redefining how we think about business, here are the leading minds and landmark ideas that have established Harvard Business Review as required reading for ambitious businesspeople in organizations around the globe.

A roadmap to understanding and achieving excellence in business analytics initiatives With business analytics is becoming increasingly strategic to all types of organizations and with many companies struggling to create a meaningful impact with this emerging technology, this book based on the combined experience of 10 organizations that display excellence and expertise on the subject shares the best practices, discusses the management aspects and sociology that drives success, and uncovers the five key aspects behind the success of some of the top business analytics programs in the industry. Readers will learn about numerous topics, including how to create and manage a changing business analytics strategy; align business priorities to technological innovation; quantify and demonstrate tangible business value; implement program processes that balance agility, empowerment, and control; and architecting a business analytics technology solution with future innovation in mind.This is the ideal resource for any organization that wants to learn how a business analytics program can help manage value, employees, and technology to translate strategies into actionable insight and achievement.