Businesses today are in a conundrum. While the current economic climate has made organizations hesitant to take a risk on a strategic investment that could be a ‘bad bet’, the pace of business and the competitive marketplace dictate that organizations move quickly to take advantage of opportunities that could create a huge revenue windfall—and create a significant competitive advantage. Unfortunately, although the vast majority of organizations have a deep visibility into the past, thanks to traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools that analyze the historical performance of the business, many still depend on intuition or simple optimism to better understand the present and future, forcing them to ‘fly blind’ when mapping their company’s future strategy. Why? There are two primary reasons: First, traditional BI tools and platforms do not provide forward-looking insight, rendering them useless in anticipating future performance. While they are able to deliver a wide range of detailed reports, sophisticated dashboards, and complex visualizations, all are based on historical information, leaving organizations stuck using guesswork, ‘gut feel’, or simple spreadsheets to anticipate the future, thereby ignoring the tremendous potential of their information assets that could give them predictive insight for competitive advantage. Second, most of the predictive analytical tools on the market today are complex, time-consuming, and expensive to use. Requiring multiple different technology systems and highly trained, specialized personnel to get from business question to predictive answer, companies that use the predictive analytical tools available today often find that the business opportunity is already in their rear-view mirror—by several weeks or months—before they have an answer. Clearly, this is unacceptable in today’s competitive reality. What today’s cutting-edge businesses need is a powerful yet easy to use predictive analytics platform that enables them to gain significant business value from predicting future business performance—quickly and inexpensively—using forward-looking insight rather than historical data. This paper will examine today’s business reality of information overload, the hurdles organizations must overcome using today’s complex, expensive, and time-consuming predictive analytical tools, and the new approach to agile predictive analytics offered by Alteryx. Making Predictive Analytics More Practical With Alteryx