The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Business Decision Making - Hardcover

A NEW MODEL FOR ANALYTIC CAPABILITY, MATURITY, AND AGILITY AT SCALE

The Sentient Enterprise summarizes the achievement of "sentience" that an analytics journey should lead companies toward. It's not meant to represent an actual destination.

The Sentient Enterprise is more of a North Star that every large business should aspire to be, as it struggles to make decisions at the speed of data. However, Mohan and Oliver did determine that a Sentient Enterprise must have five foundational qualities.

It must be:

• Proactive and able to sense micro-trends signaling the next opportunity or alerting the next crisis
• Frictionless because it can act as a single organism without any impedance or bottlenecks
• Autonomous to listen to data and make decisions in real time without much human intervention
• Scalable to any size company and able to leverage unlimited data for making decisions
• Evolving through intelligence that is native and emergent

In order to get there, any enterprise has to go on a journey. The Sentient Enterprise journey is the way your company will get there. This methodology is disrupting entire industries and changing the very nature the very identity of large companies across nearly all sectors of our economy. It is a journey every big company should take if they seek to understand how data can help them become even better in order to survive and compete in today's data-driven marketplace.

It will change the way everyone in business makes decisions from small, tactical ones to mission-critical ones by continuously decomposing problems into manageable components.

But it is a journey only a few brave ones have started because it is as long-term and complex as it is realistic and valuable. But make no mistake about it it's an ongoing journey.

There is no finish line.

This is not for the meek or faint of heart.

It's for the early adopters among you who want to get ahead of the competition or for the followers among you to ensure your survival.

And for the unconcerned? Hmm... well... odds are you will lose out to your competitors who are already building architectures and strategies to lead the way.

Mohan and Oliver believe you can be the pioneers of your organizations. You want to take your company in the direction it needs to go to survive, lead, and disrupt in this changing, data-intensive world.

This book will inspire you by getting you to think about how this model can bring you competitive advantage and not just ideas about data innovation. Success is possible if you embrace the changes and methods needed to fully leverage big data analytics for your businesses.

OLIVER RATZESBERGER is executive vice president and chief product officer of Teradata Corporation. Prior to Teradata, he spent seven years at eBay where he led their data warehouse and big data platform programs. He also has deep experience with open source startups. Ratzesberger joined Teradata in early 2013 as leader of the Teradata Research & Development software teams. As head of Teradata R&D, he now oversees a global organization including more than 1,900 technologists around the world.

MOHAN SAWHNEY is the McCormick Foundation Chair of Technology, Clinical Professor of Marketing and the Director, Center for Research in Technology & Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Professor Sawhney is a globally recognized scholar, teacher, consultant and speaker in innovation, strategic marketing and new media. His research and teaching currently focuses on modern marketing, organic growth and business innovation. Professor Sawhney advises and speaks to Global 2000 firms and governments worldwide and has written six management books as well as dozens of influential articles in leading academic journals and managerial publications.