Looking in the rearview mirror to evaluate the success or failure of your business decisions can be helpful, but it only gives you a view of how you did or didn't do, without offering direction of where you are going and how you will fare in the future. The ability to reflect on the past was a foundational value to early analytics. Today, innovations in analytics are used by businesses that want to view things in the present, in real-time, and use this to predict and understand what is likely to happen tomorrow.