Data Mining Book Review: Future Ready

If you are working on forecasting, you may be interested in the book from Steve Morlidge and Steve Player: Future Ready – How to master business forecasting.

If you are working on forecasting, you may be interested in the book from Steve Morlidge and Steve Player: Future Ready – How to master business forecasting. Whereas Dance with Chance was more about the limitations of forecasting, the present book is about the way to apply forecasting to existing businesses.

Let’s be clear from the very beginning on the fact that this book is not about the technical aspect of forecasting. You will neither learn about forecasting techniques, nor about evaluation criteria. However, you will learn critical factors to successfully integrate forecasting into your company: purpose, time, models, measurement, risks and process.

The book explains critical concepts such as the difference between prediction and forecasting. Authors go further by describing the Cassandra paradox: “a perfect prediction is perfectly useless”. Future Ready is also full of forecasting examples and case studies.

Morlidge and Player put the emphasis on key issues of implementing forecasting in a company and one can see their experience in the domain. Authors provide a list of symptoms and issues with forecasting. For example, managers may believe too deeply in forecasting. To be noted an excellent and comprehensive glossary at the end of the book.

To conclude, Future Ready is a perfect complement to a more technical forecasting book. It will teach you what experience usually bring to you: how to avoid pitfalls. It is thus an inevitable resource for anyone implied in forecasting.