It's not often that I rave about a buttoned-down business gathering, but I'll make an exception for the Competing on Analytics Symposium presented last month by Harvard Business School Press and co-sponsored by SAS and Intel.  BI guru Thomas Davenport emceed the event held Jan. 17 in Manhattan's ultra-posh Metropolitan Club, an Italian Renaissance-style hangout for J.P. Morgan and his peers during the Gilded Age. Designed by Stanford White and based on Roman palazzos of the 16th century, the opulent club fronting Fifth Avenue and facing Central Park was the perfect setting for a day of hard-core discussions about analytics.

Gary Loveman, the CEO of Harrah's Entertainment, and a former associate professor at Harvard Business School, captivated the IT-savvy audience with anecdotes about Harrah's use of analytics-based strategies to achieve success in a market dominated by larger, more notable rivals. Glenn Wegryn of Procter & Gamble, Keith Coulter of Barclays and Irving "Bubba" Tyler, formerly of Quaker Chemical, spoke passionately about their experiences in a panel discussion that exceeded expectations.

The net takeaway of the symposium - aside from the lesson that if you can afford to hold an affair at the Metropolitan Club, you should - is that analytics can make a difference. The big remaining question is this: How far into the organization can you reasonably expect an analytics strategy to penetrate before running into a wall of resistance from people who just don't get it?

Jim Davis, the affable chief marketing officer of SAS warned me not to expect analytics to march "out of the backroom and into the boardroom" in the next couple of months. "But the strategic power of business intelligence is more and more in the forefront of executive thinking -- even if they don't fully understand it," Davis told me.

His remarks cut to the heart of the challenge facing BI proponents, i.e., explaining the tangible value of BI to folks who don't have deep experience in statistical analysis or operations research.

That's why the Metropolitan Club was the perfect venue for last month's meeting of analytics minds. In the 1890s, titans of industry would gather at the club to exchange ideas about the future. Their conversations set the stage for the economic miracles of the 20th century. Surely some of that magic remains among the marble columns, hand-painted ceiling panels and gold leaf decor.

Clearly, BI is evolving from technology to strategy. Since I'm a brand strategist, I'll take it a step further: BI is evolving into a definable brand attribute.

Gary Loveman is fond of saying, "Don't talk to me unless you have a control group." Two or three years from now, this level of focus on analytics won't seem eccentric - it will be mainstream. Executives who can't chat about analytics and BI will seem hopelessly out of it.

In many organizations, BI is still locked down securely within the IT fiefdom. Those organizations will find themselves hobbled as their competitors embrace BI as a fully articulated strategy.

As Professor Davenport noted, analytics strategies must be championed by top management to succeed. Relevant gatherings such as the Competing on Analytics Symposium make it harder for top management not to listen.

"We need to push out information to the greatest number of users in an organization and create a culture that bases strategy on fact-based decisioning," Davis told me. He suggests the creation of Business Intelligence Competency Centers. Ideally, your BICC would function as a central location and collective memory for driving and supporting an enterprise-wide information strategy. Your BICC would coordinate current efforts, ensuring that information and best practices are shared throughout the organization. In essence, the BICC would be a nexus for communicating the value of BI.

The BICC is a great idea. I hope that Davis continues promoting valuable new ideas at events such as the symposium. Kudos to SAS, Intel, and Harvard Business School Press for pulling it off. Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan would surely have appreciated the effort.