The Power to Predict: How Real-Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and Beat the Competition

Overall I liked the book - it was readable and well-written. It is a little Tibco-centric and seemed to be written before Vivek had many examples of the kinds of businesses he discusses - otherwise it would get 5 stars. Vivek introduces the pressures in the business world pushing companies to be both real-time and increasingly predictive and how a real-time, predictive business can be more successful. This section is the best part of the book, laying out a nice case for change. His set of chapters on specific industries- financial services, telco, logistics, retail and consumer goods, healthcare, energy, and the military are discussed - is much weaker. There is too much on what is forcing change in those industries and not enough on how organizations in those industries can and have changed into real-time, predictive businesses. He ends with some discussion of how to get your business ready for predictive and a little bit of future gazing. Although he is very focused on the event sense and respond part of this kind of business, all his examples have also automated decisions and are actively managing them. Indeed it is largely through these automated decisions that his examples apply predictive analytics. Many of the examples overlap with those in Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, where the analytics in question are being used as part of deciding how to respond to events. He does not go into enough detail on either the event-processing side (try The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems instead) or decision automation side (try Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions) but the book would certainly help you articulate the value of the kind of changes he discusses.

I read a lot of business books for my MBA and for work. Most are theoretical and difficult to understand how the concepts are being applied. The Power to Predict was refreshing as it gives an exec-level perspective of the business landscape, changes that have occurred over the past few years, and a look ahead. Each chapter has real world examples that gave me an overview of a wide variety of industries. The other thing I really liked about this book is that it was a quick read and very comprehensible.