I've got an article in DM Review which hits on one of the things about analytics that's often overlooked--the state of mind and organizational culture that their use and popularization encourages:

One of the things that adoption of analytics across the enterprise does is encourage everyone in an organization to think like an analyst.  This can have effects a bit like those of the Kaizen process improvement practices that have helped to revolutionize manufacturing organizations, but extended to areas of the organization where the rigor of statistically controlled processes hasn't been found (or possible).  Recently CIO magazine focused on how the Oil & Gas industry uses BI, but which featured a quote that I thought captures the idea of an anaytic culture perfectly:  The idea that "It's powerful notion to run a company with the mind-set that virtually every employee is a data analyst." 

Oil companies have always lived and died on BI, says Gary Lensing, VP and CIO for global exploration and production at the $32 billion Hess. "Data drives what we do, always quantifying where that value is." 

"The ability for people on a platform to communicate with people in the home office and work on the same set of data means we can get more production done faster and more accurately," he says. "How you choose to analyze the data and the decisions you make-there's your competitive advantage."

"Engineers and geoscientists and everyone have been taught BI from the start," says Lensing... Give people in any industry access to information along with tools to interpret the past, model the future and imagine different paths between the two, he says, and they can change the trajectory of companies.

There can be powerful systemic from this sort of approach to analytics.  When everyone in an organization is expected to approach problems in an analytical, and fact-driven way, it makes coordination, communication and decision easier, and results in better decisions.