What’s that buzzing sound?

Five years ago this month, INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) published the first issue of Analytics magazine. During the early planning stages, it took a group of folks on a conference call.

(INFORMS officers and staffers and Lionheart Publishing personnel) about one nanosecond to come up with a name for the publication (Analytics) and about a minute to come up with a tagline (“driving better business decisions”). Anyone who has ever served on an ad hoc committee knows that has to be an all-time land speed record for group decision-making.

Looking back, what amazed me was not so much the speedy consensus around the name (what else are you going to call a magazine about analytics?), but that the title “Analytics” had not already been claimed by some other publisher. After all, a few months before our conference call, the best-selling book “Competing on Analytics” by Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris had seemingly and instantly turned “analytics” into a must-have for every organization and turned number-crunching, back-office analysts into corporate rock stars. The business world was all abuzz over analytics, yet miraculously the magazine title was still out there, waiting to be claimed by INFORMS, which grabbed it and ran with it.

Five years later, the business world is still buzzing over analytics. If anything, the buzz has grown louder, as information technology research heavyweights such as Gartner jump on the bandwagon. But buzz and buzzwords do not produce a better decision-making process, and many organizations and analysts are still grappling with some basic questions about analytics, such as: How do we get started with analytics? How do we achieve analytics success? Perhaps most importantly, does analytics live up to the hype?

Glad you asked. Three of our columnists address those very questions in this issue of Analytics. Andy Boyd tackles the first in his Profit Center column (“Getting started with analytics”), Atanu Basu offers insight on the second in the Executive Edge column (“Five pillars of prescriptive analytics success”) and Vijay Mehrotra explores the provocative third question in his Analyze This! column (“Are analytics and big data overhyped?”).

Five years later, we still have more questions than answers about analytics, but we learn something new every day.