Accenture predicts that more companies will choose to compete on analytics as their distinctive capability in the next five years. Accenture divides this analytical world of the future into three categories: approaches driven by technology, those involving human capabilities, and those involving changes in business strategy.
We believe that the series of technological capabilities that are already used on a small scale within organizations will expand in the future. These capabilities include pervasive business-intelligence software, dedicated business-intelligence appliances, automated decisions, real-time analytics, alerts to gain management attention, visual analytics and increased mining of text. There are also several technology-oriented changes that will most likely become somewhat prevalent over the next few years. These changes include direct-discovery technologies that let managers go directly to the cause of variances in results or performance, and systems for capturing lessons from organizational experiments.
Companies will also want to better understand how key decisions are made within their organizations. They will therefore educate managers on analytical decision-making processes, review their key decisions with regard to the processes used, and evaluate them not only on the outcome of their decisions, but also on the processes, information and analyses used to make them. As the number of organizations that become aware of the possibilities for analytical competition increases, they will push the boundaries of analytics in their products, services and business models. Accenture expects to see more analytics embedded in or augmenting products as relationships with suppliers and customers increasingly include the provision of analytics.
Accenture believes that companies will begin to take steps to analyze and report intangible assets in the near future. We expect that strategic concerns will also drive organizations to pay substantial attention to new metrics and their interrelationships in analyses and scorecards. Subsequently, we anticipate particularly high levels of activity in human resources and talent management, as these have been relatively unmeasured in the past. Most important, these metrics must be incorporated into business and management decision-making processes.
Analytical competitors will continue to examine their strategies and their business capabilities to understand where they can obtain an analytical edge. They will focus on what makes their organizations distinctive and how analytics can support or drive a distinctive capability. In order to continue refining their analytical capabilities, companies will focus on both their human and technological dimensions.
Perhaps most important, analytical competitors will continue to find ways to outperform their competitors. They'll get the best customers and have the most efficient and effective marketing campaigns and promotions. Their customer service will excel, their supply chains will be ultra-efficient, and they'll have the best people or the best players in the industry. They'll understand what non-financial processes and factors drive their financial performance, and they'll be able to predict and diagnose problems before they get out of hand. They will make a lot of money, win a lot of games, or help to solve the world's most pressing problems. They will continue to lead us into the future.