How do you win with data? SMR surveyed global executives about turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage. Here’s an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face.

Last May, at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium main-stage discussion on “Emerging Stronger from the Downturn,” one panelist listened with a growing private smile as his fellow speakers described example after example of how technology-driven information and analytics applications were transforming their companies. The stories were of data and analysis being used to understand customers, parse trends, distribute decision making, manage risk; they foretold of organizations being reinvented and management practice being rethought. They told of change, basically. A lot of it. Driven by ever-emerging technology and the new things it could do.

That was the point at which the panelist, a multinational industrial COO, turned to the audience and unofficially summarized, “So, the lesson: If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

He’s right. Change is here. Failure to adapt means irrelevance. Time and progress march on, but at a Moore’s law pace instead of a clock’s. [Más…]

However, the focus on exactly what’s changing can be misplaced. For all the swiftness with which technology is shifting — getting smarter, more powerful, more cognitively “human” — it’s sometimes true that the attention we pay to the next new technology is a distraction. It distracts us from the changes that organizations could make with no more new technology at all — the changes organizations could achieve just by capitalizing on how current technology can enable them to capture, analyze and act on information. (Though the “just” in that sentence may be ill-advised.)

MIT Sloan School’s Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, talked about that kind of change in an interview with SMR:

“Although most of what I’ve been talking about has focused on changes in the technology, I think the biggest changes are going to be in the way the companies use the technology. If some catastrophe happened and technology just froze for the next couple of decades, I believe the pace of organizational change would continue just as rapidly, because we have so much catching up to do. Specifically, I think this cultural mentality of using data more effectively, running experiments and responding to the environment and replicating it is something that is going to happen regardless of what additional advances we see in the underlying technology. A decade from now, I expect companies to be far more responsive, far more innovative, far more analytics-minded.”

Brynjolfsson gave experimentation special emphasis, but his observation fits other information-enabled practices found under the big tent of analytics. The technology is here. The data are available. How will companies use them to win?

To answer that question, SMR has teamed with the IBM Institute for Business Value to build a new innovation hub and research program called “The New Intelligent Enterprise.”

Through the SMR and IBM IBV collaboration, The New Intelligent Enterprise aims to help managers understand how they can capitalize on the ways that information and analytics are changing the competitive landscape. What threats and opportunities will companies face? What new business models, organizational approaches, competitive strategies, work processes and leadership methods will emerge? How will the best organizations reinvent themselves to use technology and analytics to achieve novel competitive advantage? How will they learn not only to be smarter, but to act smarter?

In the months ahead, this inquiry into the makeup of The New Intelligent Enterprise will consist of survey research, in-depth interviews with thought leaders and top corporate executives worldwide and the most relevant academic research and case study work in the field. This article presents (very) early returns on that research — especially on the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey, a global survey of nearly 3,000 executives who told us about their top management goals, their uses (and misuses) of information and analytics as they attacked those goals and the management practices in play in their organizations. In both this article and “10 Data Points,” we call out some of what we’re learning. The articles have been coauthored by core members of The New Intelligent Enterprise team: Steve LaValle, IBM Global Strategy Leader for Business Analytics and Optimization; Nina Kruschwitz, SMR Special Projects Editor; Rebecca Shockley, IBM IBV Global Lead for Business Analytics and Optimization; and Fred Balboni, IBM Global Leader for Business Analytics and Optimization.

Please note: What’s here is only preliminary — a true “first look” at the themes, benchmarks and questions that are surfacing. Next on the schedule: conclusive analysis of the survey and stage-one interview findings will be published in a New Intelligent Enterprise Special Report on October 25. Selected interviews will be published online through early winter. And in late December, the Winter issue of SMR will include further exploration of the key ideas in October’s Special Report.

For now, though, consider the following notes — and the survey statistics in “10 Data Points” — as a collective reminder to reexamine your own practices and plans. As the gentleman said, If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

Here are 10 observations and questions about analytics-driven management that have popped out of research and interviews so far, and which we’ll be exploring more deeply in the major reports ahead.