Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfss for the Harvard Business Review. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

Artwork: Tamar Cohen, Happy Motoring, 2010, silk screen on vintage road map, 26″ x 18″

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“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

There’s much wisdom in that saying, which has been attributed to both W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker, and it explains why the recent explosion of digital data is so important. Simply put, because of big data, managers can measure, and hence know, radically more about their businesses, and directly translate that knowledge into improved decision making and performance

Consider retailing. Booksellers in physical stores could always track which books sold and which did not. If they had a loyalty program, they could tie some of those purchases to individual customers. And that was about it. Once shopping moved online, though, the understanding of customers increased dramatically. Online retailers could track not only what customers bought, but also what else they looked at; how they navigated through the site; how much they were influenced by promotions, reviews, and page layouts; and similarities across individuals and groups. Before long, they developed algorithms to predict what books individual customers would like to read next—algorithms that performed better every time the customer responded to or ignored a recommendation. Traditional retailers simply couldn’t access this kind of information, let alone act on it in a timely manner. It’s no wonder that Amazon has put so many brick-and-mortar bookstores out of business

The familiarity of the Amazon story almost masks its power. We expect companies that were born digital to accomplish things that business executives could only dream of a generation ago. But in fact the use of big data has the potential to transform traditional businesses as well. It may offer them even greater opportunities for competitive advantage (online businesses have always known that they were competing on how well they understood their data). As we’ll discuss in more detail, the big data of this revolution is far more powerful than the analytics that were used in the past. We can measure and therefore manage more precisely than ever before. We can make better predictions and smarter decisions. We can target more-effective interventions, and can do so in areas that so far have been dominated by gut and intuition rather than by data and rigor.

As the tools and philosophies of big data spread, they will change long-standing ideas about the value of experience, the nature of expertise, and the practice of management. Smart leaders across industries will see using big data for what it is: a management revolution. But as with any other major change in business, the challenges of becoming a big data–enabled organization can be enormous and require hands-on—or in some cases hands-off—leadership. Nevertheless, it’s a transition that executives need to engage with today.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business and the author of Enterprise 2.0 (Harvard Business School Press, 2009). Erik Brynjolfsson is the Schussel Family Professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the director of its Center for Digital Business. They are the co-authors of Race Against the Machine (Digital Frontier Press, 2012).