Tom Davenport has a neat article in Optimize on creating an analytical culture and has a number of examples of (mostly) customer and profitability centric analyics. A few weeks ago, Businessweek had an even more fascinating article Math will rock your world which explored how "quants" are revolutionizing many aspects of CRM, search, other areas of pattern recognition.
When we look at how many cycles the average company spends in developing, revising, re-revising, politickng its annual budget, we know the state of analytics in most companies is frozen in the 80s. The new analytics, and those coming out of the supply chain (see LARTE - Location Aware Real Time Enterprise), are pretty revolutionary and I liked the portion where Tom talks about building an analytical culture.
With one caveat. An earlier generation of analytics has destroyed many an airline. Using yield management airlines still try and optimize inventory pricing. Many got too smart for their own good, and lost price leadership to the Southwests who delivered fairer and more predictable (and not always cheaper) pricing.
For all the left brain stuff these analytics deliver, organizations still need their right brain functions.
