Accenture on Analytics

Accenture has an interesting little study published here:

http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4777

Short story: everybody thinks they need better analytics because they still make lots of decisions based on intuition. True, that.

Still, I wonder if there is enough attention being paid to some of the reasons for the gap between the need and the practice.

One thing that keeps surprising me is how much data there isn't, especially given the data there is. One firm I worked for quite literally could not identify customers who disconnected their service, moved to a new home, and then reconnected service. There was, then, no way to tell what proportion of "new connects" were actually new and what proportion were old, reliable customers simply re-establishing their service.

But the even more profound problem is the question of what to do with the data that exist. If you attempt to perform analysis without some theory behind it -- and this happens all the time -- you will get entirely subjective results. Basically, you wind up with an argument that says the company ought to substitute the analyst's prior beliefs and intuition for the intuition and prior beliefs of the other managers. Firms are going to find this to be less than compelling.