There’s been a lot of noise lately about the concept of in-memory analytics. As a recent example, if you followed the press around some major conferences in late April, you’ll notice that a lot of messaging was present around in-memory analytics products. Many people have been asking questions about how in-memory can fit into [...]
Unstructured data has been a very popular topic lately since so many big data sources are unstructured. However, an important nuance is often missed – the fact is that virtually no analytics directly analyze unstructured data. Unstructured data may be an input to an analytic process, but when it comes time to do any actual [...]
There is a lot of hype about the new position of “Data Scientist” (see January’s Fortune magazine). I am always happy for analytics professionals to get recognition and excitement about what we do and I’m not really hung up on what title is used. However, if you take the time to think about it, the [...]
A few weeks ago, I attended the Hadoop World show in New York to hear first-hand how organizations are making use of the new technology. In future postings, I may address what claims I thought entered the hype zone and what value propositions seemed weak. However, I want to focus here on three specific cases [...]
We always hear about the benefits of analytics done correctly and used well. What we don’t hear as often are the dire consequences of analytics done poorly and used inappropriately. There are occasions where people’s lives can literally be ruined because of an analysis that is poorly designed or incorrectly interpreted. The story I will [...]
As a result of the attention business analytics has received in recent years, we’re seeing a proliferation of conferences tied to analytics. It seems like everywhere one turns, one finds another analytics conference. In addition to totally new shows, there are also some conferences that weren’t historically focused on business analytics that are now shifting [...]
How Can You Help “Bob The Marketing Guy” Succeed With Analytics? In my last blog, I wrote about the pitfalls of allowing “Bob The Marketing Guy” to build complex analytics or models using a user friendly tool, when he doesn’t really know what he is doing. Well, we cannot just tell Bob he can’t do [...]
