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Predictive Business Analytics-ForwardLooking Capabilities to Improve Business Performance, by Lawrence S. Maisel and Gary Cokins. Wiley and SAS Business Series, Hoboken, NJ, 2013, 272 pp., $49.95, ISBN: 978-1-118-17556-9.
Reviewer: Zhaojun (Steven) Li, Western New England University, 1215 Wilbraham Road, Springfield, Massachusetts 01119-2684.
This book consists of five parts, and each part discusses a focused them about why predictive business analytics (PBA) are needed, the principles and methods to deploy and implement PBA, and the challenges and trends in adopting PBA for sustainable business success and performance improvement. Part One of the book, consisting of Chapters 1 and 2, answers the question why PBA is the new wave for improving business performance. The predictive nature of PBA is emphasized when comparing PBA with existing or traditional business decision support methods, e.g., business intelligence. According to the authors, the primary purpose of PBA is to identify how the future might look and what actions need to be taken by understanding well the various causeand-effect relationships. The guiding principles extracted from the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) for PBA structuring and modeling is presented in Chapter 2.
Part Two of the book discusses in more detail how a business can develop and deploy PBA. Chapter 3 of this part describes 7 guiding principles for designing or constructing decisions based on PBA. These guiding principles form the foundation for developing PBA but are not hard rules. In Chapter 4, developing and designing PBA functions are discussed following three steps: Process design, model development, and data capture. In the model development step, some analytical...