It is always important to continue to sell the value of analytics within your organization, especially to your leaders.   Usually, these type of results are delivered via reports, dashboards, or emails.   However did you know that analytics:

1. Detects when expensive machinery like electrical submersible pumps (ESP) or oil platforms need maintenance before they break.
2. Helped find the pieces of the space shuttle Columbia by simulating and predicting where the pieces would most likely have landed.
3. Allowed a college professor to save her husband's leg.  He had diabetes, and his doctors recommended amputation below the knee. However, his wife used text mining on new diabetes clinical trials and came up with valid alternatives that his doctors agreed would work.
4. Helps protect credit card purchases by detecting fraud.
5. Helps improve North Carolina citizens' safety by tying information together across multiple law enforcement agencies and surfacing that information to officers out on the streets.
6. Reduces the adverse effects of administering multiple vaccines in different order for different patients.
7. Discovers root cause of manufacturing process issues and helps fix them before they become a major recall.
8. Helps detect criminal activity associated with electricity usage patterns.
9. Helps determine best treatment of MRSA.
10. Predicts the NCAA basketball teams to be invited to the NCAA tournament (100% for 2013).

These are just ten of my current favorite analytics successes. They're the types stories we need to tell our children to make them more interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), wouldn't you agree?  To find out other interesting ways analytics are used across a variety of industries you may want to attend SAS Global Forum in Washington D.C. March 23rd through the 26th.