I am impressed with the level of detail available in sports statistics, when an announcer says something like, “This is the third time in Major League Baseball history that a starting pitcher was pulled from a playoff game at home in the top of the ninth inning with two outs and one man on second base while leading the game by three runs but behind in the series by two games on a Saturday before the series moved to the opposing team’s field.”
A more powerful and practical use of sports statistics is portrayed in the book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” in which author Michael Lewis documents the Oakland A’s use of sabermetrics, the analysis of sports statistics, to help management select players and improve team performance. The draft choices that the sabermetrics recommended were counterintuitive and not based on the traditional attributes of desirable players. As a result of following the sabermetric draft recommendations, A’s General Manager Billy Beane was able to build an excellent team on a low budget. A great video from IBM, “The Future of Baseball,” explains sabermetrics and its business applications in more detail.
While we may not always have the same level of detail available for business decision-making outside of sports, books such as “Moneyball” and “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” document the power of analytics to provide insights that we would not otherwise have.
In his article, “Business Intelligence in the Cloud,” William Laurent argues that business intelligence (BI) systems have been difficult and costly to implement, but the availability of software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI systems is making BI affordable and accessible to almost any business. In another article, “BI for the Front Lines,” Birst Founder and CEO Brad Peters suggests making BI available to more employees than only executives for decision making, and that SaaS BI is making it possible. In this article, “Where On-Demand Business Intelligence Makes Sense,” David M. Rabb presents the trade-offs between on-premises and on-demand BI solutions.
As businesses fight hard to succeed and survive, they may learn from sports teams such as the Oakland A’s that used analytics to help make their most important decisions and win with fewer resources than their competitors. The advent of SaaS BI solutions makes the use of BI for decision-making by more people in an organization more possible than ever before; that’s a statistic that should help us all in the long run.
How does your organization plan to use BI to improve your ability to compete?
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