Statistics as a business process

I'm not really an unbiased observor in this field but smart companies are betting their companies on statistics rather than intuition, and its paying back in greater dividends for their investors.

Examples include:

Amazon: The space for tabs on the home page is highly limited. Thus, department heads at Amazon are under intense pressure to get the tabs they are responsible onto the main page. In a normal work environment this might result in creative and inefficient political means to determine which tabs get on. Almost no incentive system can solve this without being gameable. And apparently that's what happened until someone got the bright idea of using simple bayesian statistics to determine which tabs optimized the companies top-line revenue the most -- these tabs then get the precious space. Get that? The company does live A - B testing and automatically slurps up the results and without interference picks the profit maximizing tabs.

More later...