Literature Review of Predictive Analytics Adoption in Business Decisions

The present paper focuses on literature review on the usage of predictive analytics in various industries and types of business decisions. Predictive Analytics has been running at the forefront of the hottest technological trends in the recent years that are impacting the businesses worldwide (google trends 2009 onwards). It is seeing its major usages in different business decisions such as predicting sales, fraudulent loan applicants, medical diagnosis, customer attrition etc. However, when it comes to utilizing Predictive Analytics (PA) to support strategic business decisions, it seems to be taking the last priority so far. After review of literature on related topics it is apparent that the business decisions are shifting from pure gut feeling based business decisions towards utilizing the information technology such as Data Warehouse, big data, decision support systems etc. It is also evident that there are a number of organizations experimenting with Predictive Analytics in different operations or tactical decision areas such as supply chain, customer buying preferences, demand management, procurement etc. However, there are hardly any evidences of its usage in strategic decisions. The reasons could be one or more of - Predictive Analytics still not being practical, it is difficult to find the people with the right skill set to implement, it is very time consuming to start getting any real benefits, business decisions should be left for the management to perform rather than computers etc. indicating why the adoption of Predictive Analytics is still limited.