In an article on Intelligent Enterprise titled Predictive Analytics: What Have You Done For Me Lately? Dave Stodder summarized a few points from Predictive Analytics World:

predictive analytics could enable companies to hang tough during lean times by helping them identify the most important customers, focus resources on critical business processes and uncover fraudulent behavior before it causes serious damage.

This is an interesting summary as it shows how predictive analytics can apply to strategic decisions (who are my most valuable customers), tactical ones (how do I reassign resources between projects) and operational ones (is this transaction fraudulent).

Of course the first one also requires that you focus on operational decisions, after all you must make decisions about how to treat individual customers in a way that reflects their value to you if you are to put that insight into customer value to work. Troy Powell, over at Walker, had a great post around this topic in which he discussed how important it was to understand how you were going to impact the business.

In fact I was struck throughout the event by the focus of predictive analytic users on operational decisions. It wasn't the only thing they used analytics for but it was sure the most prevalent. You can check out my blog post summarizing what I learned at Predictive Analytics World too if you like.