The promised land of new data-driven businesses, greater transparency into how operations actually work, better predictions, and faster testing is alluring indeed.

But that doesn't make it any easier to get from here to there. The required investment, measured both in money and management commitment, can be large. CIOs stress the need to remake data architectures and applications totally. Outside vendors hawk the power of black-box models to crunch through unstructured data in search of cause-and-effect relationships. Business managers scratch their heads"”while insisting that they must know, upfront, the payoff from the spending and from the potentially disruptive organizational changes.

The answer, simply put, is to develop a plan.

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Keywords: supply chain management, supply chain management IT, supply chain solutions, business data analytics, data mining, data-driven supply chains