The Power to Predict: How Real Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and Beat the Competition

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.