A weekend thought on analytics

I have often thought about what is the kind of analytics I want to do and tried to correlate it with the kind of analytics that companies are thinking of doing.

• I want to think of analytics as a key to strategy. Organizations want strategy to define the analytics required for the business.
• I want to do analytics to optimize social benefits. After all, what is policy but a goal programming issue! Policy makers are driven by soft objectives and non-economic intentions more than economic incentivization. They ignore data for convenience.
• Analytics can, potentially, be used for wealth allocation. Just as Activity Based Costing helps organizations decided the key contributors and key unproductive consumers of resources, good analytics in the social context can help us define how the resources should be reallocated.
• I want to do analytics on product development. I can see that organizations validate product ideas using analytics more often than analytics for coming up with ideas. Aren't there creative people who can think of random surveys already done by equally random agencies and come up with new product ideas?

In short, my ideas on analytics have a pretty strong (negative) correlation with the reality!