At The Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas, Jim Davis, SAS Chief Marketing Officer, opened his presentation with an opportunistic spin: "A good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but recession is the mother of innovation."

In November of this year, Peter Drucker would have turned 100, yet his timeless advice still rings true:

Now more than ever, executives must focus concurrently on 3 time horizons:

1. Make the present business effective.
2. Identify and realize the potential of the business.
3. Make the present business into a different business for a different future.

Davis pulls back the covers for the audience to discuss SAS' experience with change and reinvention. "SAS has seen more change in the past 12-24 months than last 30 years. We're in the third phase of this evolution. In our first phase, we were focused on tools and products. From 1976-1995 we were all about creating tools for data access, data mining, operations research. We developed about 200 prods. If we continued along that path, we wouldn’t be here today. In 1995 we recognized the future is in solving business problems so we moved into developing horizontal solutions for CRM, human capital management and IT performance management. Then in 2000, we said this isn't going to last either—this isn't good enough. People need to more fully understand the value of their solutions, which meant going to industry solutions. It took three times longer and a lot more money than we thought, but we did it. So the question becomes: Are you asking yourself whether what you’re doing today is going to take you forward to the next five years?"

That’s where the importance of data and, specifically, business analytics comes into play. Davis harkens back to the conference theme, Innovate and Optimize: "It's not just about best practices, it's about creating new practices, and dealing with the disruption. Business analytics can help create transparency around your risk, and help you minimize it. Many people say optimization is all about cost cutting and reallocating resources. But it’s also about focusing on core competencies." Davis cautions the audience, however, that balance is important:

"Too much optimization may challenge your long-term viability. Don’t strip yourselves down to the point that you can’t sustain your operations or resource the innovation. It's important to maintain a balance between innovation and optimization."

In the context of the economic climate, Davis shares McKinsey research that indicates that businesses are feeling more optimistic in their future planning. BusinessWeek asked 101 CEOs what their 2009 priority initiatives are and what impact they see business analytics having on these initiatives (see image below; click to enlarge).

"We're seeing a re-emergence of a focus on the customer," Davis says. "Along with profitability improvement, business performance management and risk management, these CEOs felt analytics can impact customer service, loyalty, and expanding the customer base. At the point of the economic collapse, the focus was much more about dealing with risk and fraud."

A business strategy conference isn't complete without some actionable advice--in this case on how companies can establish and support a culture of analytics, to begin impacting key business areas. From Davis:

1. Assess if and how your're currently managing fact-based decisioning. Are you doing it in silos, where data is bound up in departments or have you broken those barriers? "When you start dealing with things like fraud and customer lifetime value," Davis says, "I guarantee you'll need to break down those barriers."
2. What skills are critical to success, and do you have programs in place to advance analytic skill sets? That skill set will be stale in 12 months if you don’t feed it.
3. What processes do you have in place to support fact-based decisioning? "Analytics" means different things to finance, marketing, and R&D. Understand their needs, and communicate thoroughly.
4. Do you have the infrastructure in place, is it scalable?
5. Do you have a culture that can support change? Is your leadership involved? Or are you just writing a check to your CFO to “fix it”? This is not just about facilitating the change, but being involved in it.

Lastly, Davis closes with a quote from Jim Collins' book, How the Mighty Fall: “Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.”

Stay tuned for more coverage of The Premier Business Leadership Series. In the meantime, follow #pbls on Twitter.