Moneyball

If you haven't heard of it already (from such fabulous blog posts as Damian's), Moneyball is a great film that does a really nice job of showing off what we can do with analytics. It really showed off some of the key steps in an analytics projects:

Business question: win more games with cheap players

Analytics question: which players are most effective at wining games / what are the factors that most influence winning games

Insight: particular metrics (e.g. "getting on base") that baseball scouts etc typically aren't interested in are most effective at predicting wins

Decision: when buying players look for those with good on-base ratings and ignore other distracting factors (e.g. looking good in a uniform)

I also really liked the way they showed that while analytics gave an edge, the team still had to do all of the things that baseball teams do really well in order to be successful. Analytics just gave them an edge. Analytics is amazing, but it is not a silver bullet.

Also, there is a nice article on npr.org that discusses what can be done with data analytics:

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142521910/the-digital-breadcrumbs-that-lead-to-big-data