Over the past decade, advances in digital analytics have transformed the way businesses operate. From marketing and pricing to customer service and manufacturing, advanced analytics is now central to many corporate functions. The same, however, cannot be said for strategy—at least not yet.

It’s time to bring advanced analytics into the strategy room—here’s why.

While strategy development will always require creative and thoughtful executives to set aspirations and make bold choices, analytics tools can give you an edge. Advanced analytics can be used to accomplish the following:

• Reduce bias in decisions by calibrating the likelihood of your strategy succeeding before you allocate resources.
• Unearth new growth opportunities by complementing traditional brainstorming methods to reveal hidden pockets of growth.
• Identify early-stage trends by painting a real-time picture of how your business context is unfolding so that you can trigger big moves before your competitors do.
• Anticipate complex market dynamics by generating proprietary insights about the combined impact of myriad forces.

Each of these applications can sharpen business leaders’ views of the competitive arena and how they can position themselves to win. But that requires putting advanced analytics front and center in the strategy process.