Getting Analytics? Use What You Learnt from It

For business organizations, deriving sustainable competitive advantage from technology is impossible. Business analytics poses the same predicament that information technology (IT) did two decades back. The question is how to unlock the value from data on a sustainable manner. The learnings gained while building IT infrastructure, in transforming it from administrator’s toolbox to a strategic weapon, can provide the key. This article uses the strategic alignment model (Henderson and Venkatraman 1993) to argue that issues identified as important during IT adoption remains highly relevant while building capabilities for analytics.