The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Business Decision Making

A few decades ago, this was enough rationale for most IT leaders to dole out resources, like benevolent gatekeepers, to the rest of their company colleagues through a stately and slow requirements-driven process. Sometimes that’s still necessary, but in a world where every home, pocket and purse has countless real-time and self serve apps, companies are embarrassingly behind the curve in making data and analytic muscle more accessible to the diverse workforce that needs to use it. In this book, we present a “capability maturity model” for Analytics capabilities in an enterprise that progresses towards the goal of becoming a "Sentient Enterprise" - an enterprise that can listen to data, conduct analysis and make autonomous decisions at massive scale in real-time. We discuss the five stages in evolution towards a Sentient Enterprise and offer real-world examples of companies that are at various stages of this journey, including Volvo, Siemens, Verizon and General Motors.