Transformational Analytics Will Set You Free

Guest blog by W Scott Evangelista, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Without committed leadership from the top of an organization, the best answers will not find the light of day, and the “my number is better than yours” issue will persist. The shackles of the past (standard reports with standard data) will inevitably bind companies to increasingly failing strategies. I believe it is time leadership embraces predictive modeling to enable better decision making.

So many companies when faced with gradual market shifts and increasing competition or strengthening barriers keep turning to old solutions and don’t recognize they are in the midst of new problems. Leadership with many companies react so slowly to change that the companies are often in dire straits before the mandate for change comes…usually from the newly appointed CEO.

The one advantage pharmaceutical companies have in leveraging predictive analytics is that most of them are so far behind the state of what is possible that they can learn quickly from other industries and adopt tested technologies to facilitate their rapid adoption.

If pharmaceutical leadership is not investing today in building robust capabilities in predictive analytics, they will soon be looking to leverage their vast experience on the lecture circuit.  Leadership needs to embrace the notion that analytics can help them create and find insights that will yield competitive advantage, and even if they don’t embrace it, they should at least be willing to do robust tests of the concept. In many ways, companies have been outsourcing these capabilities for years to vendors that do very robust statistical modeling and make recommendations on how resources should be allocated. This results in many companies getting the same advice (most use the same few vendors) and having no meaningful advantage.

It’s time for a change, the lecture circuit isn’t that interesting.

To hear other perspectives on how business analytics can be leveraged for a strategic advantage, you might want to check out the recent Pharm Exec Webcast in which I  participated on a panel Daniel Feldman of the Pharmaceutical Management Science Association, and SAS’s Patrick Homer.