CRM was born from a frustration that sales managers had with knowing what their people were really doing. That drove the emergence, if not the popularity, of sales force automation (SFA). SFA was an attempt to corral the freewheeling activities of salespeople as much as it was an attempt to capture and make sense of the reams of sales data they produced.
In this last of a 3-part series on analytics, Thomas Davenport, President's Distinguished professor of IT at Babson College, talks about trends that are shaping business intelligence and analytics, and how it is impacting the competitiveness of enterprises.