mind+machine
A Decision Model for Optimizing and Implementing Analytics
Marc Vollenweider
Cover image: © iStock.com/sumkinn
Cover design: Wiley
Copyright © 2017 by Evaluserve Ltd. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada
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ISBN: 9781119302919 (cloth); ISBN 9781119302926 (ebk); ISBN 9781119302971 (ebk)
To my wife Gabi and our children Michèle, Alexandra, Eric, and Mike
Thank you for buying this book.
In 2015, after 15 years of operations in the field of research and analytics, we decided to adopt the notion of mind+machine at Evalueserve. We believe this marriage of the perceptive power of the human brain with the benefits of automation is essential because neither mind nor machine alone will be able to handle the complexities of analytics in the future.
The editorial team at John Wiley & Sons approached me in November 2015 to ask if I would like to write a book on how our mind+machine approach could help with the management of information-heavy processes – a topic that is of increasing interest to companies worldwide. We got very positive feedback from clients, friends, and colleagues on the idea, and decided to go ahead.
Mind+Machine is for generalist mainstream middle and top managers in business functions such as sales, marketing, procurement, R&D, supply chain, and corporate support functions, particularly in business-to-business (B2B) and B2C industries. We're writing for the hopeful beneficiaries and end users of analytics, and for people who might need to make decisions about analytics, now or in the future. The book is not a technical text primarily addressed to data scientists – although I firmly believe that even those specialists have something to learn about the primary problem in generating return on investment (ROI) from analytics.
We won't be looking at super-advanced but rare analytics use cases – there are specialized textbooks for those. Instead, we're looking at the efficient frontier, offering practical help on dealing with the logistics of managing and improving decision-making support and getting positive ROI at the same time.
After reading this book, you should know about key issues in the value chain of mind+machine in analytics, and be in a position to ask your data scientists, IT specialists, and vendors the right questions. You should understand the options and approaches available to you before you spend millions of dollars on a new proposal. You'll learn some useful things to demystify the world of analytics.
We're also proposing a novel approach, the Use Case Methodology (UCM), to give you a set of tangible and tested tools to make your life easier.
We've included 39 detailed case studies and plenty of real-life anecdotes to illustrate the applications of mind+machine. I'm sure you'll recognize some of your own experiences. And you'll see that you're far from alone in your quest to understand analytics.
