Book review : Competing on analytics

Competing on Analytics : A new Science of Winning is an interesting book even if it doesn’t explain anything about how to do real analytics. It’s just not the point. It’s objective is to give you some insight on why and how you need to move your business in a more analytical way.

The book is full of real analytics examples. For instance, baseball teams use analytics to manage their team composition. You don’t need to have the best players, you need to hire good player with a cheap salary in order to maximize your profit.

The book gives you ideas on how you can use analytics in the different fields of a company : financial, manufacturing, R&D, Human resources, CRM and suppliers. I know how to do analytics and data mining, but how to apply it to business processes is more tricky. At the end, nobody cares about the validity of yours models if they don’t earn any dollar. This book is about that, showing why and how you could make more money using analytics.