In the past, organizations primarily relied on decision-support tools to analyze financial and sales transaction data and trends.
Now, most organizations analyze all sorts of business and technology transaction information to make better operational decisions across the enterprise.
If an organization is going to transform how they serve customers, many different decisions from customer segment(s) to target to technology investments are made more quickly using analytics applications by leveraging a lot of internal and external data.
If an organization is going to invest in new information and communications technology to better serve customers, then it is prudent to leverage tools and data to understand more quickly and accurately understand the gaps needed to be filled in order to support a new technology/system.
Analytics tools are great to support this process and for answering many other types of questions.