Analytics the Right Way: A Business Leader’s Guide to Putting DAta to Productive Use
Tim Wilson and Joe Sutherland
Wiley (January 2025)

Here are techniques, frameworks, and ways of thinking that can help create high-impact analytics

Tim Wilson and Joe Sutherland explore the root causes that have led countless organizations (whatever their size and nature may be) to invest great amounts of time, energy, and dollars in their data infrastructure, in reporting and analysis technology, and in substantial data and analytics teams without realizing the business value they expected. Those directly involved in these initiatives — as well as their organization’s C-level executives — would have been well-advised to have read and re-read Analytics the Right Way before planning and then those initiatives.

More specifically, Wilson and Sutherland focus on explaining HOW TO

o Specifiy the roles of decision-making and actionability in order to derive the greatest value from data
o Create a framework for data usage
o Measure performance, validate hypotheses, and enable operational processes
o Derive the greatest value from all data and analytics

One of several vaue-added benefits of Wilson and Sutherland’s lively and eloquent narrative is their repudiation of four widespread, durable misconeptions:

1. With enough data, uncertainty can be eliminated.
2. Data must be comprehensive to be useful
3. DAta are inherently objective and unbiased.
4. Democratizing access to data makes an organization data-driven

These are among Tim Wilson and Joe Sutherland’s concluding thoughts: “The steadily increasing volume and complexity of the data, along with the increasingly broad range of analytical tools and techniques available, means that focus and clarity powered by human thought have never been more important.”

Analytics the Right Way is a brilliant achievement. Bravo!