Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK BEGAN WITH A phone call to Tom. Scott Van Valkenburgh, head of platform partner relationships at the business intelligence software firm SAS Institute, called me (after being directed to me by Keri Pearlson of The Concours Group—thanks, Keri) and asked me if I was interested in doing some research on the state of business intelligence in companies. I quickly said, “Heck yes,” because my former colleague at Accenture Jeanne Harris and I had done some previous research in that domain, and I was still very interested in it. Scott brought his colleague Mike Bright and a couple of his partners from Intel up for a meeting at Babson, and we embarked upon the research that led to this book. Thanks to Scott, Mike, Jim Davis, Margo Stutesman, Keith Collins, and Jim Watts at SAS, and Andy Fields and his colleagues and predecessors at Intel for getting us started on the “competing on analytics” idea and providing numerous insights along the way.

In January 2006 I wrote a Harvard Business Review article on the subject—thanks to Leigh Buchanan for doing a great job of editing it and pushing my thinking—and it took off better than just about anything I’ve written. I did some further research sponsored by my friends at SAP—thanks to Dan Pantaleo and Stacy Comes of the Strategic Issues Group there, and Roman Bukary, who headed the BI practice at the time. Things were going so well that I decided to explore a book on the topic. I knew that Jeanne Harris had once led the business intelligence practice at Accenture, and was a great coauthor. We approached my old friends at Harvard Business School Press—thanks to Hollis Heimbouch and Astrid Sandoval for saying “go for it” and being great editors. Their colleagues in the conferences side of HBS Publishing, Eric McNulty and Angelia Herrin, worked with SAS and Intel to put on a great conference on the subject in New York. Thanks to them too. Now nothing was left but the writing. I’ll let Jeanne talk about who helped on her side.

I want to begin by expressing my deepest thanks to the many senior executives at Accenture who have shared their enthusiastic support and encouragement along the way. Our CEO Bill Green said he thought the book was a great idea. Particular thanks go to Bob Thomas, executive director of the Institute for High-Performance Business, and Tim Breene, who heads Accenture’s strategy and corporate development, for their consistent support and always incisive insights. With their encouragement, I enlisted many smart, prominent senior executives at Accenture who willingly shared their firsthand experience and expertise working with clients to compete (and win) with analytics. Thanks especially go to our research sponsors for their support and honest feedback: Mike Sutcliff, Managing Director for New Businesses; Royce Bell, CEO of Accenture Information Management Solutions; Alton Adams of our Customer Relationship Management practice; Hettie Tabor, who leads the SAP business intelligence consulting; and David Mann, a leader in our Products practice. Thank you also to the sponsors of the enterprise systems and analytics survey: Dave Hill, Patrick Puechbroussou, Jim Hayes, and Mark Jones.

In addition to contributing their insights, many Accenture senior executives helped me find some outstanding examples to showcase in the book, including Walt Shill, Paul Nunes, Brian McCarthy, Jeff Merrihue, Umesh Hari, Jane Linder, John Copeland, Ramin Mikhali, David Sheehy, Sanjay Mathur, Baiju Shah, Andy Fano, and John Ballow. I am, as always, grateful to my friends and colleagues at the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business for their generous assistance and willingness to contribute great ideas. Finally, I want to express special thanks to Pete Bott, Norm Rickeman, and Jean Davis, who many years ago set me on the path that eventually led to writing this book.

Of course, we (Jeanne and Tom) reserve our greatest thanks for the pioneering executives of analytical competitors who freely gave of their time. We interviewed lots of them, but the earliest and most generous contributors (more or less in sequence) were Gary Loveman and David Norton of Harrah’s, Glen Wegryn of Procter & Gamble, Zahir Balaporia of Schneider National, Inc., Ed Ng of Mars, Nell Williams and Stefan Chase of Marriott International, Gregor Bailar of Capital One Financial Corporation, Bubba Tyler of Quaker Chemical Corporation (now at IMS Health), Kent Kushar of E. & J. Gallo, Steve Schmidt of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Jeff Zabin at Fair Isaac Corporation.

For help in doing the research, editing, and pumping out the prose, we’d like to thank Mike Beers, Don Cohen, Linda Harding, Al Jacobson, Christine Lentz, David Light, Chi Pham, Erica Toomey, and especially Eric Lowitt. Thanks also to five anonymous reviewers, one of whom we’re pretty sure included our diligent and wise friend and former colleague Mark McDonald. We did our best to take your counsel to heart and hope you like the results.

We’d also like to thank our families for dealing with our first (Jeanne) and twelfth (Tom) books, respectively. Jeanne especially thanks her husband Carl and her daughter Lauren for their love, encouragement, and inspiration. She could not have completed this book without them; together they give her life meaning and much happiness. She also thanks her mother Rhoda Harris and sister Susie for their unwavering encouragement and enthusiasm. Tom thanks Jodi for predicting that the analytics topic would be a hot one and for once again enthusiastically supporting his every venture. He’s analyzed all his personal data and discovered that his wife is highly correlated with his happiness. He thanks his sons Hayes and Chase for passionate discussions about baseball as an analytical discipline, particularly the Boston Red Sox.