The Sentient Enterprise

The Sentient Enterprise

by Oliver Ratzesberger, Mohanbir Sawhney, Thomas H. Davenport
Released October 2017
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9781119438861

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Book description

Mohan and Oliver have been very fortunate to have intimate views into the data challenges that face the largest organizations and institutions across every possible industry—and what they have been hearing about for some time is how the business needs to use data and analytics to their advantage. They continually hear the same issues, such as:

  • We're spending valuable meeting time wondering why everyone's data doesn't match up.
  • We can't leverage our economies of scale while remaining agile with data.
  • We need self-serve apps that let the enterprise experiment with data and accelerate the development process.
  • We need to get on a more predictive curve to ensure long-term success.

To really address the data concerns of today's enterprise, they wanted to find a way to help enterprises achieve the success they seek. Not as a prescriptive process—but a methodology to become agile and leverage data and analytics to drive a competitive advantage.

You know, it's amazing what can happen when two people with very different perspectives get together to solve a big problem. This evolutionary guide resulted from the a-ha moment between these two influencers at the top of their fields—one, an academic researcher and consultant, and the other, a longtime analytics practitioner and chief product officer at Teradata. Together, they created a powerful framework every type of business can use to connect analytic power, business practices, and human dynamics in ways that can transform what is currently possible.

Table of contents

  1. Foreword to The Sentient Enterprise
  2. Introduction
    1. Analytic Awakening at the Scale of Business
    2. Collaboration without Chaos
    3. An Evolutionary Journey (That’s Already Begun!)
    4. A Framework for Agility
  3. CHAPTER 1 Reimagining the Enterprise
    1. Disruption and Decision Making
    2. Self-Disruption at Cisco: On Purpose and at Scale
    3. Self-Disrupt in Sustainable Ways
    4. Analytic Pain Points and a Self-Service Revolution
    5. Access and Control
    6. A Necessary Evolution
    7. Putting It All Together
  4. CHAPTER 2 Leveraging an Expanding Universe of Data
    1. A Universe of Data: Expanding Exponentially with New Sources
    2. Game-Changing Capabilities
    3. Well-Intentioned Anarchy
    4. Data Marts and Their Discontents
    5. A Solution? “LinkedIn for Analytics”
    6. Getting Back to eBay: Fulfilling the Analytics Mandate
  5. CHAPTER 3 The Agile Data Platform
    1. Retaining Agility at Scale
    2. Rethinking Waterfall Methodologies
    3. Agile Analytics
    4. Spreading Agility Company-Wide with the Virtual Data Mart
    5. A Virtual Data Mart (by Any Other Name) in Action
    6. Time Boxing
    7. Fewer Requirements, More Prototypes
    8. Analytics on Analytics
    9. Making It Real with the Layered Data Architecture
    10. Driving Change in the Auto Industry
    11. Remembering the Big Picture
  6. CHAPTER 4 The Behavioral Data Platform
    1. Personalized—If Not Personal—Interaction
    2. New Measures for Success, Built on Behavioral Data
    3. Leveraging Behavioral Data for Real-World Business Challenges
    4. Behavioral Data Is Everywhere
    5. Agile Systems for Behavioral Data
    6. Back Inside the Layered Data Architecture
    7. Reaping Value and Insight
    8. Proactive Data Standards and Designing for the Unknown
  7. CHAPTER 5 The Collaborative Ideation Platform
    1. Avoiding “Anti-Social” Analytics
    2. The Problem of Metadata at Scale
    3. Collaboration and Context at Scale
    4. Merchandising Analytic Insights
    5. Staying on the Path to Value through Analytics on Analytics
    6. Adoption Takes Time
    7. Operationalizing Insights
  8. CHAPTER 6 The Analytical Application Platform
    1. Turning Analytic Insight into Action Across the Organization
    2. Lessons from the Cloud
    3. Creating an App Economy for the Enterprise
    4. DevOps to Make It Real
    5. Less ETL . . .
    6. . . . More “Data Listening”
    7. Setup for Sentience
  9. CHAPTER 7 The Autonomous Decisioning Platform
    1. Fast-Changing Capabilities
    2. Self-Driving Cars . . . and Companies
    3. “System of Systems” Building Blocks for Sentience
    4. Algorithms: A Must-Have for Autonomous Decisioning
    5. Strategically Applying Algorithmic Intelligence in the Enterprise
    6. Algorithmic “Magic”
    7. Analytics on Algorithms to Improve Decision Making
    8. Combining Algorithms on the Home Stretch to Sentience
    9. Agility as the Ultimate Litmus Test
  10. CHAPTER 8 Implementing Your Course to Sentience
    1. Ask the Right Questions, Warts and All
    2. Agile Strategic Planning Is Not an Oxymoron
    3. Adopt a Start-Up Mind-Set and Don’t Boil the Ocean
    4. Pick the Right Internal Partners to Demonstrate Value
    5. Embrace Agile Project Management Strategies
    6. Embrace Concurrency, Ensure Scalability
    7. Design In Governance That’s Seamless and Repeatable
    8. Optimize a Workforce to Act Fast, Fail Fast, and Scale Fast
    9. “It’s the Culture, Stupid”
  11. Conclusion
    1. The Ergonomics of Data: Redefining Human–Data Interaction
    2. Society-Wide System of Systems Adoption
    3. The Greater Good
    4. Looking to the Future
    5. A Final Word
  12. Acknowledgments
  13. About the Authors
  14. Index
  15. EULA

Product information

  • Title: The Sentient Enterprise
  • Author(s): Oliver Ratzesberger, Mohanbir Sawhney, Thomas H. Davenport
  • Release date: October 2017
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781119438861