Although analytics and BI can show us symptoms, they can’t show us what’s causing them. We are so focused on data, and for years consultants have been talking about it. But the truth is that the future is all about new, AI-driven tools for diagnosing things, like MoreThanDigital Insights. We need to stop using BI and BA and look at the real reasons for performance – the health and useful information.

The term “data-driven” has become a ubiquitous mantra in boardrooms and development teams, yet for many organizations, its promise remains unfulfilled. Why? Because simply adding more dashboards and numbers isn’t solving any real problem. In fact, we’ve become obsessed with the numbers themselves. Companies have invested billions in sophisticated analytics platforms, yet a staggering 70% of digital transformation projects fall short of their intended goals. This points to a fundamental disconnect between the technology we deploy and the strategic success we seek.

Now, before I hear you already think, “All this Data-driven BLA is useless, I knew it,” we need to admit that this isn’t a failure of data itself, but a failure of our approach to understanding it. We’ve become exceptionally good at creating tools that tell us what is happening in our business – the operational data – but they consistently fail to reveal the deep, systemic why – the strategic insights.

The reason most ‘insights’ from current analytics tools are not useful to strategic leaders is that they are too abstract. For example, a dashboard showing a 5% dip in quarterly user engagement is operational data, but a CEO or product lead needs to make a strategic decision. This ‘actionability gap’ isn’t a failure of data visualization or processing speed or some “LLM-AI Magic”; it is a fundamental mismatch between the operational language of our tools and the strategic language of our leaders. The problem isn’t the dashboard, but the data on it.

This article introduces a new way of thinking about management, which many organisations are using with MoreThanDigital Insights: It’s about looking beyond simple measurements to understand how well the organisation is really doing, and finally connecting the dots between data and real results.

The Current Analytics Landscape: A Rearview Mirror and an Biased Crystal Ball

To understand where we need to go, we must first understand the limitations of where we are. The current data decision-making landscape is dominated by two primary disciplines: Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA). While often used interchangeably, they represent distinct, albeit related, approaches to using data for management.

Business Intelligence (BI) – The Corporate Dashboard

Business Intelligence platforms are the bedrock of modern operational management. Their primary purpose is to answer the question, “What happened?” by summarizing historical and present data. BI prioritizes descriptive analytics, consolidating data from disparate sources – such as sales dashboards, supply chain logs, and marketing analytics – into a unified view to eliminate guesswork in day-to-day decisions.

Tools like Tableau and QlikView are masters of this domain, providing managers with customizable dashboards, reports, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer a real-time or near-real-time snapshot of business operations. If sales of a particular product spiked in a specific region, a BI dashboard will show it clearly, allowing a manager to react by increasing inventory to meet demand. In essence, BI provides essential operational awareness.

Business Analytics (BA) – The Predictive Engine

Business Analytics attempts to look forward, moving from description to prediction. It seeks to answer the questions, “Why did it happen?” and “What will happen next?” BA leverages statistical models, data mining, and machine learning to uncover patterns, identify correlations, and forecast future outcomes.

For instance, while BI would report the sales spike, BA would analyze the underlying data to determine that the spike was caused by a social media influencer’s post. This insight allows the business to make a more educated prediction about future demand and prescriptively recommend a new marketing strategy, such as collaborating with other influencers. BA is often considered a subset of the broader BI process, focused on turning the data collected by BI systems into forward-looking, actionable insights.

The Strategic Blind Spot: Why BI and BA Fall Short

Despite their undeniable power, both BI and BA operate on the surface of the business – with things that happened (lagging data) and things that are the result of underlying topics. Don’t get me wrong, they’re excellent at optimizing existing processes and reacting to market signals, but they fail to question the health of the underlying organizational system or anything that has to do with STRATEGIC DECISIONS. To paraphrase it a little: They can tell you if you’re winning or losing the current game, but they cannot tell you if you’re playing the right game in the first place.

This limitation manifests in several critical ways:

• Lack of detail and background: Traditional BI tools look at past data and often don’t provide enough detail to find the exact reason for an issue. It’s like using a torch to light up a football stadium, where only a small, pre-defined part of the data is lit up, while the rest stays in darkness. This can mean that important information is missing, which forces decision-makers to guess what it is, which is a process that is prone to error.
• The Decision Gap: Even in a fast-paced business environment, there is a long time difference between an insight appearing on a dashboard and a decision being made and put into action. This “decision gap” can make many useful insights seem outdated before they can be put into action.
• The focus is on “day-to-day operations”: The main problem with these tools is that they are designed to provide information about what is happening, but not the reasons why it is happening. A dashboard can show declining sales, but it cannot identify why a company is not innovating enough, why the company culture is not right, or why the way the company sells its products or services is old-fashioned.
• Human Bias and Misinterpretation: The rise of self-service BI, while it gives people more power, has also made it more likely that things will be misinterpreted. If you don’t have a plan that looks at the bigger picture, different departments can collect and analyse data in isolation. This can lead to different people coming to different conclusions and making decisions based on incomplete or biased views.

I would even say that this constant stream of real-time operational data from BI and BA dashboards creates the illusion that management is aware of what is going on in the business. The feeling of being in control is made stronger by the ability to react straight away to small changes in KPIs. But this focus on short-term, tactical improvements uses up management time and resources, and makes leaders always have to react. If you don’t take care, the organisation becomes very good at managing its own decline. This is a state of “analysis paralysis”, where lots of data lead to small changes but no big strategic progress. This means that the tools don’t just fail to provide strategic insight; they actively distract from the need for it.

The Missing Discipline: Business Diagnostics (BDx) And Business Diagnostics Intelligence (BDI)

To break this cycle of reactive management and address the root causes of performance issues, a different approach is required. Business Diagnostics (BDx) and the more advanced Business Diagnostics Intelligence (BDI) is not an incremental improvement on BI or BA; it is a distinct discipline focused on assessing the holistic health and capability of the organization itself.

Its methodology is fundamentally different. Rather than examining outputs such as sales and revenue and attempting to determine the causes, Business Diagnostics employs a process of ‘working backwards’ to identify the reasons for suboptimal performance by systematically linking causes and effects. It provides a thorough analysis of all business areas, including management, finance, operations, marketing and, crucially, less tangible factors such as organisational culture and innovation capabilities. The goal is to move beyond treating symptoms (e.g. ‘sales are down’) to identifying the underlying cause (e.g. ‘our sales process maturity is critically low’ or ‘our product innovation pipeline is fundamentally broken’). This is achieved through a systematic evaluation of key business functions, internal statuses and organisational structure, often benchmarking performance against industry standards to provide objective insight into such measurements.

While BI and BA treat the business as a collection of independent metrics to be optimised individually, Business Diagnostics treats it as an interconnected, complex system. It recognises that a weakness in one area, such as ‘People & Culture’, will inevitably and predictably impact performance in another area, such as ‘Financial Health’ or ‘Customer Satisfaction’. This systemic view allows it to open the ‘black box’ between a company’s inputs (e.g. investments, costs, people) and outputs (e.g. revenue, profit, sales).

Traditional analytics looks at siloed data streams – such as sales, marketing and financial data – and struggles to connect them in a meaningful, causal way. However, a business is not a collection of silos. It is a system in which inputs are transformed by a complex set of internal capabilities – its processes, culture, technology, innovation readiness, IT systems, data and, of course, strategic alignment – into outputs. Business Diagnostics is the first discipline to explicitly model and measure these internal capabilities – the machinery inside the ‘black box’. By analysing dimensions such as ‘Strategy & Innovation’, ‘Data & Analytics Maturity’, and ‘Processes & Operations’, it can reveal causal chains that are completely invisible to traditional tools. For instance, it can demonstrate how a low maturity score in an organisation’s ‘Data & Analytics’ capability is causally linked to poor ‘Customer Engagement’ and ultimately to stagnant revenue growth. BI and BA cannot achieve this level of strategic insight by their very design.

MoreThanDigital Insights: The World’s First Business Diagnostics Platform

For decades, this kind of deep diagnostic analysis was the exclusive domain of high-end management consulting firms, accessible only to the largest corporations with the deepest pockets. MoreThanDigital Insights is the first platform to productize and democratize Business Diagnostics, making data-driven strategic management accessible to all organizations.

A 360° Health Check for Your Business – Strategic Diagnostics for Real Insights

MoreThanDigital Insights provides a comprehensive, 360° view of a company, going well beyond basic KPIs to evaluate the maturity and effectiveness of the entire organisational system. Its proprietary model, developed with input from over 120 leading industry experts and organisations, analyses more than 1,400 business dimensions across 300 unique topics and 12 vital categories. These include traditional financials as well as critical maturity areas such as strategy and innovation, people and culture, IT and technology, and customer engagement. The platform effectively provides a comprehensive health check for the business.

From Ambiguous Problems to Prioritized Solutions

Rather than providing another dashboard for monitoring, the platform delivers a ‘Company Health Report‘ ready for strategic action. Rather than providing raw data, it delivers a comprehensive report – sometimes spanning over 100 pages – filled with in-depth analysis, comparisons and, most importantly, prioritised recommendations. It helps leadership teams identify critical areas of weakness and opportunity, enabling them to prioritise the most impactful strategic topics based on data. This eliminates the guesswork and gut-feel decisions that often dominate strategic planning, enabling leaders to allocate their limited time and resources to the areas that will generate the greatest return. Furthermore, the platform provides crucial external context, allowing users to benchmark their results against those of their peers or industry averages. Comparison groups can be personalised by country, size and industry.

Democratizing Strategic Management

At its core, MoreThanDigital Insights is built on a philosophy of equitable access. It challenges the long-held notion that deep strategic tools should be an exclusive luxury where such analysis and data access can cost 100s of thousands of USD and even millions. The platform operates under a #bethechange commitment, with a mission to grow economies by giving every business access to world-leading tools and knowledge. In a disruptive move, the basic version of the platform is offered for free, making data-driven strategic management a reality for businesses of all sizes, from startups to global enterprises. This mission is backed by a commitment to objectivity; MoreThanDigital is 100% independent, privately owned, and neutral. It does not offer consulting services or have hidden commercial agendas, ensuring that the insights it provides are unbiased and trustworthy.

A lack of shared understanding and language across leadership teams is one of the most significant barriers to effective strategy execution. Different departments tend to use different terminology: marketing talks in terms of leads and conversion rates, finance in terms of margins and EBITDA, and IT in terms of uptime and security protocols. This functional fragmentation creates friction and strategic misalignment. MoreThanDigital Insights solves this issue by providing a single, standardised, objective framework for discussing the entire business. Everyone from the CTO to the Chief Human Resources Officer can see how their area of expertise contributes to the organisation’s overall maturity scores across a unified model. The platform’s collaborative features allow managers to invite colleagues and gather feedback within this shared framework, encouraging cross-functional, systemic conversations. The debate is no longer “My marketing dashboard says X” versus “My sales dashboard says Y”. Instead, it becomes, “Our organisation’s overall ‘Customer Engagement’ maturity score is 2.1 out of 5, whereas our competitors’ score is 3.5 — there is a significant gap, and we need to work on this!” This is a fundamentally more strategic and productive conversation that fosters alignment where there was once discord.

Part 4: Analytics in Action: Solving a Stagnating Revenue Problem

To really hammer this point home, let’s walk through a common business nightmare: revenue has flatlined. Here’s how the three different approaches would tackle the problem, and why only one gets to the heart of the issue.

The BI Approach: The “What”

A typical BI dashboard – let’s say it’s Power BI – paints a clear, if depressing, picture: a line chart showing six quarters of flat revenue. A manager can slice and dice the data to see the decline is steepest in Product Line X and in the North American market.

Result: The team has situational awareness. They know what happened and where it happened. But this is where the useful data ends. The next steps are left to anecdotes, opinions, and a whole lot of guesswork. They might decide to double down on marketing in North America, but they’re flying blind, just reacting to a number on a screen.

The BA Approach: The “Why” (or at least a good guess)

A business analyst, using a predictive tool, digs deeper. They ingest sales data and external market information, and a model identifies a correlation between the revenue stagnation, increased competitor ad spending, and a slight dip in the market index. The model forecasts a further 5% decline next quarter if nothing changes.

Result: The team now has a plausible theory for why revenue is flat – external pressures. The suggested action is tactical: “Let’s increase our own ad spend to counter the competition.” It’s a reactive, short-term fix aimed at managing a symptom rather than curing the disease.

The BDx/BDI Approach: The “Root Cause”

The leadership team runs a MoreThanDigital Insights assessment. The platform confirms the flat revenue but then peels back the layers to reveal the true, internal root cause. The company’s “Strategy & Innovation” maturity score is a dismal 1.5 out of 5, well below the industry average of 3.5. Simultaneously, their “Customer & Customer Engagement” maturity is a low 2.0, with specific weaknesses in co-innovation and gathering customer feedback.

The platform’s interconnected analysis highlights the critical causal link: the company’s inability to innovate is directly impacting its ability to retain customers, who are leaving for the very competitor the BA tool flagged.

Result: The organization finally understands the deep, systemic nature of its problem. The issue isn’t a competitor’s ad budget; it’s the company’s own broken internal systems. The recommended action isn’t a short-term ad war, but a long-term strategic initiative to overhaul product development and build robust customer feedback loops. The team now has a clear, prioritized, and data-backed plan to cure the disease, not just treat the symptoms.

The Evolution of Data-Driven Tooling

In short: Stop Measuring Symptoms. Start Curing the Disease.

In the future, the most important thing for managers will be how they use the information they have, not how many data points they have or how fancy their dashboards are. It will be defined by who understands the health of their organisation most deeply and acts on that understanding most decisively. The move from checking how things are going to checking how they could go wrong is as important as the move from guessing to the information itself. Companies that accept this change are more likely to survive and even thrive, turning difficult problems into clear chances to grow.

The real problem with creating a culture that uses data in the right way is not a lack of data. It is a lack of data that leaders can understand and use. It is time to stop focusing on short-term goals and start looking at the bigger picture of the business. The “big black box” that sits between your investments and your results is no longer a mystery. It is a complicated system made up of different abilities, processes and cultural factors. We can now measure, analyse and improve this system. This is the future of management, and with platforms like MoreThanDigital Insights, it’s here now.