The trend from technology to strategy is another reason to de-emphasize the word analytics in high level messaging.  It makes sense to propeller-heads as Gary Loveman, Chairman, CEO, and President of Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc., calls them, but weakens the business intelligence case.  It invokes intuition or gut instinct as counter examples.  This incites a culture clash between Vulcan and Human which is now a popular story of a difference that makes no difference.

WSJ devoted a whole article on the gut instinct of Warren Buffet and how he built an investment empire on it.  The message is if you can be more like Buffet maybe you don’t need analytics.  The truth is Buffet is like a supercomputer loaded with analytic software and his decision-making, his ‘gut instinct’, wasn’t built in a day.  

To this point Irving "Bubba" Tyler, former CIO of Quaker Chemical, paraphrased Malcolm Gladwell’s in Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, “Gut-decisions work very well when the person making them has a long history of experience and they study data.  So it is not the way you make a decision it is on what basis you are making a decision.  So if I make a decision and I don’t pull out a piece of paper to go back and look at those 25 years doesn’t mean that I am not using business intelligence.  It looks like gut decision but I have been in the business for 25 years.  It’s data, information, business intelligence.”  The distinction to be made is analytic tools enable decision-makers to be more often correct and better understand how they are wrong if they go wrong than without them.