Editorial Review:
In the mid 1980s systems integration visionary Vivek Ranadivé broke the real-time information barrier and helped to digitize Wall Street. With his international bestseller The Power of Now, he helped usher in the real-time business revolution of the late 1990s. Now with this groundbreaking new book, Ranadivé brings news of the next big leap in business systems evolution-The Power to Predict. Real-time business gives companies the ability to monitor and react to changes and address problems as they occurr. But no matter how sophisticated their information-gathering and data mining systems are, they're still playing catch-up. In The Power to Predict, Ranadivé forecasts the next step in achieving breakthrough business performance, a new approach he calls Predictive BusinessTM: the ability to anticipate business problems and opportunities and to act preemptively. Predictive Business allows companies to take real-time information, correlate it with historical patterns, and recognize events that hold tremendous profit potential. In an effort to stay ahead of the curve, a handful of companies have been quietly making the transition from reactive organizations to proactive, anc are well-suited for a customer-centric business paradigm. Ranadive takes us inside a number of these companies-including Amazon, Pirelli, Harrah's, E. & J. Gallo, Wal-Mart, and 7-Eleven--to show how they are making that transition, and are able to: - Anticipate customer needs and be ready satisfy them the minute they emerge
- Be prepared for sudden events such as a power outage, spikes in demand for a product or service, logistic issues due to changing weather patterns, or evolving customer requirements
In The Power to Predict you'll discover how your company can accomplish these goals by continuously matching real-time events with historical patterns to improve business processes. Just as important, you'll get expert insight to improve business processes and advice on what it will take to align your company's resources, technology, and culture into an unstoppable, world-class Predictive-Business.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Well written overview of automated business  2007-08-29
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.
Shameless marketing  2006-08-08
Shallow veneer of "why" overlayed with "my company" and "my software" Sad.
A great read  2006-03-04
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.
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