I personally believe analytics is a tremendously powerful tool. That said, it is just a tool. It has to be combined with informed analysis applied toward a specific outcome in order for it to be useful in a business sense.
A little knowledge can also be a dangerous thing. It is especially so when we think we are more capable than we actually are. There is a famous saying that "correlation does not imply causation". In other words, simply because one trend looks like another does not mean that the two are related.
There is a new website that helps to demonstrate this principle. Spurious Correlations lists a number of trend lines that have a 99% correlation. Unfortunately, they also have exactly zero relationship to each other. It would be madness to say that one causes the other. We ought to smile and remind ourselves of this as we start to examine our own data.
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