Strategic Data Analytics for Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Data and analytics have become major assets for all organizations to leverage into superior strategic positions in this cut-throat competitive world with buzzwords like ‘data crunch’, ‘metrics’, and ‘dark data’. This chapter discusses the structural and economic reasons of why business analytics is necessary for organizations. The ability to collect different resources and entities such as talent, process, data, and information technology to bring out a valuable output is crucial for business analytics success. The most common difficulty of ‘big data’ begins when organizations are in the journey of business analytics. Since a number of organizations are still in the baby steps of basic, tackling data challenges is humongous for them. This situation calls for the need to foster a business analytics ecosystem by every organization. This paper discusses how optimizing analytics could lead to a sustainable competitive advantage, building data strategy, and setting Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for business analytics. The chapter further explores how analytics is used across business domains and the challenges in crafting a business analytics strategy.