It is easy to build useless analytics. Intelligence works against us. Smart people easily come up with plausible ideas for business improvement metrics. These nice-sounding ideas then take a year to build, but afterwards … nobody uses them.

Breakthroughs, the analytics driving big increases in ROS for example, are available. Everyone can sense it. But analytics projects get off track. Useless analytics have a strange gravity. Attracting adrift projects, and derailing breakthroughs.

It seems safe to build analytics everyone else is building. Dashboards for instance. Once hot, now not. During analytics projects it seems logical to want analytics we do not need. And this is a shame because all resources needed to go beyond analytic fad-surfing are freely available. Project teams are willing. Business decision makers are drowning in improvement wishes, the raw gold-ore of breakthroughs.

What is missing, is a process for refining gold-ore into breakthroughs. Something fast, that goes deeper than safety, that produces tools that get business users pounding on doors if updates are late.

I’ve just finished a first draft of a chapter on Wanting Analytics We Need. This is a refinement process for breakthroughs.