It’s time to change that perception. In an era of digital transformation, analytics is now the most important business process in our organizations<\/strong> \u2013 and it\u2019s time for us to start treating it like one.<\/p>\n There are five domains<\/a> that make up these digital platforms: IT Systems, Customer Experiences, Things, Intelligence, and the Ecosystem Foundation. The domains are interconnected and independent and organizations will focus on the one or few with the most impact for them, but it’s\u00a0clear that Intelligence<\/strong> — i.e. data and analytics — is at the heart of the organizations of the future.<\/p>\n For the last few decades, we\u2019ve typically thought of business intelligence as a byproduct of our operational processes. We manufacture products, ship them around the world, and sell them to customers. Each of these processes generates a lot of data, and we use that data both to keep track of operations and to create more optimized processes in the future.<\/p>\n The typical customer journey is a great example. Think about how you purchase products today. In the old days, it was a fairly linear process that companies could characterize as a \u201csales funnel\u201d. But now it\u2019s more like a \u201cwrite your own adventure\u201d book \u2013 where there are many different possible interaction paths, and at each point in the process, you as a customer get to choose the next chapter and the next point of interaction.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/analytics-is-now-the-most-important-business-process-in-your-organization-2.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a>But despite that, analytics is still too often treated as an afterthought, as something used to track the effectiveness of business\u00a0processes, or as a set of tools for making pretty visualizations\u00a0and telling “data stories.”<\/p>\n<\/a>According to Gartner, today’s CIOs are responsible for building the “civilization infrastructures<\/a>” that are not just going to reshape business, but also the way we\u00a0live.<\/p>\n<\/a>This remains as true and important today as it\u2019s ever been in the past. But organizations are increasingly realizing that digital transformation doesn\u2019t just require new processes \u2013 it requires a new approach to creating and implementing<\/i> business processes<\/i>. They have to be more agile, more intelligent, and more responsive to change.<\/p>\n<\/a>These new processes flip the traditional equation on its head. New processes are created on the fly<\/strong>\u00a0by<\/strong> analytics<\/strong>.<\/p>\n