It amazes me that in the year 2015 100% of the straw poll wouldn't be for decision making. In my humble opinion that is what analytics is all about.

It’s clear when you analyze analytic capabilities that there are three main reasons people use analytics:

A need to report on some aspect of the organization
A need to monitor the organization’s behavior or performance
A need for the organization to make data-driven decisions

As part of my recently completed research on the analytic capability landscape, we did an interesting straw poll. We asked those attending a webinar on the topic which of these was the business goal for their analytic efforts today and how did they see that changing in the next 12-24 months. The split is shown in an excerpt from the infographic at right. Today the split is pretty even with reporting and monitoring coming in at 37% each with deciding – making decisions – slightly under at 27%. This matches my experience – lots of companies are still focused on reporting, many have moved on to dashboards and performance monitoring as their focus while a growing number are explicitly focused on decision-making.