On Thursday, Babson College hosted the 2008 MetLife eBusiness Thought Leadership Conference. The focus of the conference was "New Trends in Technology: Bringing Businesses Closer to their Customers" and though that could cover a broad range of topics, the conversation primarily revolved around two: Web 2.0 and Analytics.

I was honored to serve as a panelist during the session on data and analytics. I was a bit intimidated to be sitting next to Analytics guru Tom Davenport (yes, that Tom Davenport), and Kurt Thearling, who as Vice President of Strategic Technology at Capitol One--one of the companies which Tom refers to as "born analytic" in Competing on Analytics--clearly knows a thing or two about winning with analytics.

The analytics discussion was interesting, but what I found most compelling about the conference was the two visions of technology's role in the enterprise presented by the different sessions. Analytics, as presented by Tom and Kurt, tends to be high-powered statistics, and as such, not something that every line-of-business professional is going to be comfortable with. On the other hand, Web 2.0 is all about empowerment and openness, and we discussed how employers can take advantage of things like wikis and social communities while maintaining the structure necessary to ensure regulatory compliance, accountability and corporate standards.

I don't think that these two things exist in opposition, at least not to the degree that one might imagine. It's clear that most business professionals are never going to be extensive users of heavy-duty statistical tools, and even if some companies, like Capitol One, install SAS on every analyst's desktop, this is unlikely to become standard procedure.

However, if the tools are easy to use, and provide rigorous analysis capability to business professionals in an appealing visual manner, I think that there's a great possibility that they can be rolled out widely, and more importantly gain wide acceptance within an organization. More than that, good tools will allow the results of these analyses be shared and updated by a wide variety of people, allowing insight to be generated and updated in a collaborative process.