Behind Every Good Decision
Behind Every Good Decision, How Anyone Can Use Business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight, by Piyank Jain and Puneet Sharm, Amacom 2014Not another Big Data, Cloud hype book, Behind Every Good Decision is a cheat sheet to those few and critical analytics and models professionals can use to cut costs, smooth processes, improve productivity, revenues, customer satisfaction, and business value. The authors look at business analytics as a problem-solving tool, and they believe that basic analytics can solve about 80% of business problems when combined with human experience and good reading of the surrounding environment. Their bumper sticker is Intuition + Data = Powerful insights --- Good decision!
Readers will appreciate Chapter 3's "Top Seven Analytics Methodologies". Going deeper, Chapter 5, Predictive Analytics, aka Rocket Science, is actually fun! Section 4, Ten Case Studies, is a brilliant take on how analytics provide a different lens through which we can view politics - Barack Obama, sports - the Olympics, Memphis crime, disease fighting, Google and innovation, and most surprisingly, money laundering.
Mill Girl Verdict: takes a dauntingly huge subject - analytics - and reduces it to clear, usable chunks. B++