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In January 2018, the chief executive officer (CEO) of logistics company Supergroup Limited (Supergroup), considered the ideal weighting of Supergroup's offshore activities given a weak South African rand and slow growth in the country. The company had nearly become bankrupt in 2009, and the CEO had been hired as the "turnaround" leader who headed its steady recovery, stabilizing the company and building its initiatives toward growth. Now that Supergroup had made a successful recovery, shareholders were asking the CEO whether Supergroup should be focusing its investment strategy outside Africa. The CEO, too, was concerned about the group's concentration in Africa. Although he and the executive team preferred organic acquisition growth to dividends, they were grappling with the question of what their future focus of acquisitions should be.

The American healthcare system is at a crossroads, and analytics, as an organizational skill, figures to play a pivotal role in its future. As more healthcare systems capture information electronically and begin to collect more novel forms of data, such as human DNA, how will we leverage these resources and use them to improve human health at a manageable cost? In this article, we argue that analytics will play a fundamental role in the transformation of the American healthcare system. However, there are numerous challenges to the application and use of analytics: the lack of data standards, barriers to the collection of high-quality data, and a shortage of qualified personnel to conduct such analyses. There are also multiple managerial issues, such as how to get end users of electronic data to employ it consistently to improve healthcare delivery and how to manage the public reporting and sharing of data. In this article, we explore applications of analytics in healthcare, barriers and facilitators to its widespread adoption, and ways in which analytics can help us achieve the goals of the modern healthcare system: high-quality, responsive, affordable, and efficient care.