Abstract
The broader availability of data and the increase of computational power is allowing organizations to find new and valuable insights, giving life to the field of analytics. The field of analytics encompasses the handling and processing of data, from the acquiring of the data to the driving courses of action. Most of the fuzz today is given to the data component of analytics. In fact, some call the field data analytics. But data is not the only component or the most important one. The other component is the mathematical models used to process the data. In fact, modeling is a key component of the analytics field. There cannot be analytics without models, but there can be analytics with small data. With that in mind, the motivation of this JM2 special issue is to recognize the importance of modeling in the analytics field.