The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics

Praise for The New Know Innovation Powered by Analytics

"Human history reflects our long—and by no means completed—ascent from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge. Thornton illuminates the knowledge explosion which itself is a critical part of what we must know next."—Alvin Toffler, author and futurist

"Be forewarned: reading Thornton May's The New Know will make you think you've spent your whole life in Plato's cave, staring at shadows on the wall. But do not despair: Thornton will take you by the hand and guide you into the sunlight. There, you'll understand that we are bobbing in an ever expanding ocean of data, and that learning to analyze it is critically important—like learning to swim."—Lew Hay, Chairman and CEO of FPL Group, the nation's No. 1 producer of renewable energy from wind and solar power

Understand the critical competency of the age: business analytics

Today's high-performing organizations are dealing with diverse issues, a wider range of regulations, and heightened global competition.

So with all these issues, why embrace business analytics? Easy . . .

• The rules have changed
• Customer expectations have changed
• Regulatory expectations have changed
• Societal expectations have changed
• Performance expectations have changed
• Possibilities have changed

Futurist and leading IT communicator Thornton May makes a convincing case for why organizations need to find innovative ways to exploit technology and operate consistently better than their competitors.

We are standing at a hinge of history, on the cusp of entering a new age—the age of The New Know, an age when just showing up is not enough.

Both a time period and a social reality, The New Know is all about moving your organization beyond just having the data, to knowing what you need to know and when you need to know it.

The big contemporary headline-grabbing news today is the aftershock and post-meltdown anguish regarding what senior executives did not know about this fraud or that risk, those employees, that cash flow, their carbon footprint, and, not surprisingly, all those customers.

The next big story, the headlines you and your team will be creating after reading premier IT communicator and futurist Thornton May's new book, The New Know, will be all about what can be known, what must be known, and, most important, what actions you will take because you know. This is the power of business analytics.

Revealing the analytics community as never before, May builds upon years of fieldwork to bring us a fascinating look at this community, which does important, exciting work affecting every aspect of your organization's life. This is a book about people you should know—and know about.

The first vernacular ethnographic and anthropological study of the analytics community, The New Know provides a map to the universe of analytics and puts the spotlight on the substantive and courageous work analysts do to make your company a better place.

This visionary book covers:

• What the art, act, and science of knowing really is

• The professionals at the beating heart of business analytics

• How the rapid rise in data, the brisk expansion of tools, and maturation of information management processes are changing various vertical markets

• How analytics creates measurable value

• How innovation happens in complex organizations today

While data analysis has been used in business since the dawn of the industrial era, number crunching was left largely to the statisticians. Celebrating the tools, processes, people, and practices of business analytics, The New Know reveals how to create information-based competitive advantage.

Thornton May knows knowing. His work on the complex intersection of the informational, knowledge, and behavioral components of organizational change includes teaching at distinguished business schools, writing for widely read technology magazines, futuring at think tanks, and keeping in monthly contact with more than 1,000 C-level executives.

May specializes in creating collaborative knowledge places, postindustrial campfires where the best and brightest convene to understand what they know, what they don't know, and what they can do about it. He currently engages executives at organizations such as the CIO Executive Summit (Evanta/DMG Group), the Multi-Channel Value Lab (Digital River), the Olin Innovation Lab (Olin College of Engineering), and the Value Studio at Florida State College at Jacksonville.

The editors at eWeek magazine acknowledged May as one of the "100 Most Influential People in IT." The editors at Fast Company consider him one of the "50 best brains in business."

Thornton May received his BA from Dartmouth College and his MSIA from Carnegie-Mellon University. He did doctoral work in Japanese studies at the University of Michigan and Keio University in Tokyo.