Foreword

Insights and knowledge lead to better decisions and it is those better decisions that lead to improved business performance. Companies that outperform their peers are those that underpin their decisions by facts, data, and analytics. I call those companies intelligent companies and believe Killer Analytics: Top 20 Metrics Missing from Your Balance Sheet by Mark Graham Brown will help any business become more intelligent. More intelligent analytics are no longer a nicety to have but a required core competence that enables any company to compete in today’s data-driven world. Enterprises without the right analytics will simply be outsmarted by their competitors and left behind.

In the past, the challenge for intelligent companies was to find data, any data, to shine some light on current performance and inform decision making. It often involved creating simple ways of counting things in order to get better insights and understanding of the business. Today, the challenge is picking the right metrics from the ever-growing mountain of data. We no longer have a data shortage, we have the opposite: a data explosion. Just digest this recent quote from Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt: “From the dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days . . . and the pace is accelerating.”

Under this backdrop of ever-growing data volumes it becomes more critical than ever that companies are able to distill information ...

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