Few areas of enterprise computing have had the business impact of analytics. Since the earliest implementation of information technology in the corporation, executives and managers have used processes and technology to analyze business activity in the hopes of doing better in the future. From the IT department's perspective, getting analytics right is one of the most important jobs there is. That's why it's so critical that IT professionals get the analytics architecture right.

Unfortunately, many companies are trying to do the critical business analysis of today (and tomorrow) with yesterday's analytics architecture. According to Claudia Imhoff, there's no way you can get analytics right if you have the wrong architecture. Explaining why that's so -- and what to do about it -- makes Imhoff an InformationWeek Expert Voice.

Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized expert on analytics, business intelligence, and the architectures to support these initiatives. Dr. Imhoff has co-authored five books has written more than 150 articles for technical and business magazines. She is also the Founder of the Boulder BI Brain Trust, a consortium of independent analysts and consultants (www.BBBT.us). You can follow them on Twitter at #BBBT.

In this conversation with InformationWeek executive editor for technical content Curtis Franklin, Imhoff began by talking about the three broad categories of analytics -- Descriptive, Diagnostic, and Predictive -- and why most companies are still stuck on the oldest and most basic form of descriptive analytics. She then turned to what enterprise IT needs to do to add more valuable analytics to their portfolio, and where in the architecture these additional analytics steps should be taking place.

The discussion continued with an examination of the missteps to avoid when implementing analytics and the considerations that should be taken in deciding between different components and designs for different analytical purposes. Finally, Imhoff talked about the differences between the analytics tools available to larger and smaller organizations and whether it's possible for smaller companies to use analytics to compete more successfully with larger players.

This latest episode in the Expert Voice series has information for CIOs and for hands-on managers. If your executive committee is looking to you and your department to answer the critical what/why/how long questions of business, then this conversations should be on your "must listen" list.