From Competing on Analytics to Competing on Models

On May 2005, Davenport Cohen and Jacobson published a working paper that a few months later appeared in HBR: Competing on analytics, one year later the book was released. This research was both chronicle and trigger of what has been called the analytics revolution or the data revolution. New positions have been invented such as data scientist and data engineers and a whole new cycle of hype around machine learning in particular and AI in general started. Analytics is presented now as the modern source of competitive advantage, is that so? Models allowed us to understand the world through the use of stylization and abstraction, that way we were able to precisely delineate ideas and complex systems that were later implemented in the real world. The Holy Grail has always been to be able to translate these models into fully automated systems with little need of human intervention and plastic enough to allow experimentation and rapid change.