The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics: 23 (Wiley and SAS Business Series) - Hardcover

May, Thornton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470461713 ISBN 13: 9780470461716

Publisher: Wiley, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

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.

From the Inside Flap

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 previous eras is that because there is more information and more ways of knowing, there is more competitive advantage to be generated from the informed and creative management of information and information technology. This flies directly in the face of some industry observers who contend that technology-being a purchasable commodity-has nothing to do with competitive advantage. With more things to know there are more places to exert knowledge leverage and more tools to create competitive advantage. Increasingly, your success in business, your standing in the community, and your physical/emotional well-being are related to the facility with which you and your enterprise can connect and then convert heretofore unimaginably large, complex, litigatable, and accessible sets of data into time- and context-appropriate action.

New Know Reality #2: There Really Is More to Know

The New Know will be awash with data. Attendees at technology conferences around the world are barraged with charismatic sound bites telling us how much data, how much storage, how much bandwidth, and how much computer power we have at our fingertips:

[M]more transistors were produced, and at a lower cost, than grains of rice.

[T]he number of transistors shipped in 2003 was 10 quintillion, or 10 to the 18th power-about 100 times the number of ants estimated to be stalking the planet.

The "pixel to pupil ratio" is so far skewed in favor of the pixels that only a small fraction of imagery can actually be processed.

Our ability to collect and store data exceeds our current capability to thoroughly process and exploit it. But, that's just the tip of the data iceberg.

Data storage-oh my gosh-the data was everywhere. Our CEO [chief executive officer] became a little cranky when he could not find how much we gave to the UnitedWay one year.

[I]f all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day/seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the top supercomputer can do today in one day.

A new blog is created every second of every day.

When I came to MIT 40 years ago there was one computer shared by thousands of students that cost $11 million. Your cell phone today is a million times cheaper; a million times smaller and a thousand times more powerful. That is a billion-fold increase in capability in price/performance. We will make another billion-fold increase in price/performance of information technology over the next 25 years.

Stephen Baker has written one of the seminal works in the field of analytics: The Numerati. In the book, we are frequently reminded about just how much information contemporary executives have to deal with:

[T]he very air we breathe is teeming with motes of information. Sloshing oceans of data, from e-mails and porn downloads to sales receipts, create immense chaotic waves. In a single month, Yahoo alone gathers 110 billion pieces of data about its customers, according to a 2008 study by the research firm comScore. Each person visiting sites in Yahoo's network of advertisers leaves behind, on average, a trail of 2,520 clues.

The network of remarkable people engaged in a variety of world-changing projects who annually assemble at the PopTech Conference in Camden, Maine (www.poptech.org) have historically used a subset of these factoids as base planning info-benchmarks:

1 billion PC chips on the Internet 1 million e-mails per second 1 million instant messages per second 8 terabytes per second traffic 65 billion phone calls per year 20 exabytes magnetic storage 1 million voice queries per hour 2 billion location nodes activated 600 billion radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in use

Just about everywhere you look and everything you read touches on the topic of information inundation. Educators worry that information inundation imperils our children. Public safety officials-the designers of police cars-complain that there is not enough room in a car for all the communications equipment that needs to fit into it. Aviation experts worry about information overload in airplane cockpits. (The magnificent new Boeing Dreamliner has over 300 computer systems on board.) NASA scientists have a whole lot of data on their hands. For example, the VW Beetle-size Landsat 5 launched in 1984 has circled Earth at an altitude of about 700 kilometers more than 130,000 times. Sensors on the polar-orbiting craft collect data at seven different wavelengths from near ultraviolet to the far infrared. Except for central Antarctica and far northern Greenland, the satellite passes over each spot on land once every 16 days and can distinguish features as small as 30 meters across. Since Landsat 1 launched in 1972, 2.3 million images have been gathered. The National Security Agency is rumored to overhear far more information than it can make sense of. Race car engineers are overwhelmed by the amount of information relayed back to them from sensors on the cars. Oil wells are now so heavily instrumented that they produce geysers of data points that are harder to process than the oil. Warfighters, formerly thought to be isolated in foxholes by the fog of war, now have so much information available that a special project, Force XXI, has been developed to help cope with foxhole overload.

Processing power doubles every 18 months. Storage capacity doubles every 12 months. Bandwidth throughput doubles every 9 months. The cumulative impact of this is that within our lifetime, every molecule on this planet will be IP (Internet protocol) addressable. There will be an incomprehensible, mind-explodingly massive expansion in the amount of information floating around. There is more to know. Julianne Conry, an educational psychologist who studies ability testing at the University of British Columbia, pointed out that each time U.S. testing companies revise their tests, "You have to know more to be average." It doesn't matter whom you talk to-storage vendors, strategy consultants, futurists, subscription research firms, or your teenage children-everyone knows that in the future, there will be more information. What exactly does this mean, given that "raw human intelligence is probably no greater today than in ancient Greece"?

One of the immediate implications of the New Know is that professionals skilled in augmenting human cognition will fare well moving forward. A recent survey at Network World places modeling, data mining, and optimization in the top 10 skill sets for the new age.

Jobs are plentiful for workers who understand data mining and related fields, such as information on demand, content management, and unstructured information management, experts say.

"The world revolves around data. Anything you can do to develop data analysis, data mining and information on demand skills is incredibly critical," IBM's [Kevin] Faughnan says.... "There's a broad range of issues involved with managing very large amounts of data and being able to process it and extract knowledge from that data," Professor Peter Lee, head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University says. "One of the things we are starting to see from leading-edge places like Google is the need for graduates with the understanding and skill to cope in the new world of data intensive computing."

Organizations are having trouble keeping up-and, sadly, the fact that there are more facts arriving at a faster rate of speed is not even the tip of the cognitive iceberg. Soldiers fighting battles with projectile weapons speak of the "fog of war" (e.g., confusion about what is going on). Info-warriors speak of the "fog of facts" (e.g., confusion about what information is to be believed, what information sources are credible, and what version of reality is to be acted on). In a world of multiple sources of information and 24-hour decision making, the very character of information is changing. A "fact" is no longer a "fact."

There are entirely new categories of knowledge available that were previously off most executive radar screens.

New Know Reality #3: You Will Have to Know More about Knowing

The typical time-starved, information-overloaded, regulation-complying, mission-obsessed, multitasking contemporary executive probably does not give much thought to how the organization thinks, or even how he or she thinks within the organization. The New Know involves knowing more about knowing. A newborn infant has very little appreciation about the stages of sensemaking whereby a sensory input of an apple somehow emerges as an understanding of what an apple is or that it is good to eat. Receptors in the toddler's retina collect data, which is converted into information, knowledge, and understanding. All of this sensemaking is, for the most part, invisible to our conscious selves.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The New Knowby Thornton May Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470461713
• ISBN 13: 9780470461716
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256