Wiley & sas business Series

    NOTE 
   1.  For a good overview on designing centers of excellence and how this links to orga-
nizational performance, see Aiman Zeid,  
Business Transformation: A Roadmap for 
Maximizing Organizational Insight  (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014).   

---

125
                                                                              C H A P T E R    
6
      Operating Models 
                                             I
nsight is easy; execution is hard. When it comes to big data and 
analytics, confusing the two is probably the single biggest reason 
organizations fail to see the returns they expect. At fi rst, it seems 
counterintuitive. After all, the point of analyzing information  is  insight, 
isn ’t it? 
 The problem with insight is that in isolation, it ’s worthless. It ’s 
what you do with it that matters, not whether you have it. Markets 
are hard and, to coin a phrase, never bring a knife to a gunfi ght. 
 Everyone has  that  friend, the one who has an answer to everything, 
the serial entrepreneur, the one who would be rich if only someone 
would bankroll his great ideas. We love being around these people, but 
late in the night, after more than a few drinks, they ’re usually a bit of a 
bore. It ’s not that they ’re wrong; they ’re just missing the point. 
 Ideas are cheap. It ’s doing something with them that ’s the hard