Illustration showing data points to represent data visualization

xLab Quarterly Roundtable—“Moneyball 2.0: Interventional Analytics and Lessons from Notre Dame’s Sports Performance Experience”

In the movie Moneyball, Peter Brand is an analyst who revolutionizes baseball by using performance data. Baseball players tend to perform in the future as they have in the past—particularly the recent past. So past performance is the best predictor of future performance of baseball players. Now all professional baseball teams use such analytics.

This is performance analytics, and it is the prevailing approach to predictive analytics of human behavior. Performance analytics involves observing what happened through measurement of key performance indicators, and then using this data to predict what will happen. Through performance analytics, organizations have realized incredible value predicting behaviors of all sorts—consumer, employee, supplier, etc. To conduct performance analytics, organizations need to build capabilities in measurement, data management, data wrangling, and rather straightforward statistical techniques for prediction.

However, past performance is not the only useful predictor of future performance. People can change behaviors and this can impact performance rather dramatically—with changed behaviors, past performance may no longer be an adequate predictor of the future. Therefore, leading organizations are now moving beyond performance analytics to what is sometimes described as “interventional” analytics that involves diagnosing and changing behaviors. Interventional analytics is significantly different from performance analytics in a variety of ways. Instead of only observing past performance, interventional analytics requires that organizations observe more fine-grained behaviors that lead to that performance. This involves richer observational techniques, stronger approaches to analysis of those observations, and other challenges that this approach entails. Organizations looking to move to interventional analytics (Moneyball 2.0) need to build capabilities that go beyond those that they developed for traditional performance analytics (Moneyball 1.0).

The next xLab Quarterly Roundtable will focus on this topic. Titled “Moneyball 2.0: Interventional Analytics and Lessons from Notre Dame’s Sports Performance Experience,” this event will be held Tuesday, March 8, from 1 to 2 p.m.

In this presentation, presenters will draw upon experiences with interventional analytics at the University of Notre Dame’s celebrated athletic programs to garner lessons about building these capabilities and the challenges implementing them. Through these experiences, the presenters will note that there are two fundamental areas with interventional analytics that are different from performance analytics; these involve (1) observing and measuring behaviors in addition to performance, and (2) generating and analyzing interventions is different from performance analytics. Finally, examples will be shared.

Youngjin Yoo, the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professorship in Entrepreneurship and xLab faculty director, will moderate this discussion.

This webinar is free and open to all, but registration is required.

RSVP to attend.