How often have you heard executives proclaim that next year, the target for financial results will be a substantial lift from the current year? For example a CEO may state, “Next year we expect to improve from a 10.3% to 15.4% rate of return on shareholder equity.” Is this leadership or wasted words? Where did [...]
It is always difficult to predict the external factors that impact your business – especially during a difficult economic cycle. IT can be significantly easier to leverage internal factors that affect business performance, and I am encouraged to see that businesses are paying more attention to one factor supremely under their control – their own [...]
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 [...]
Many businesses are entering new and exotic areas of analytics, with initiatives to capture social media data, job market information, and the like. These are exciting efforts, no doubt. But often the best sources can be found more easily if business intelligence groups first focus on data sources closer to home and easier to control. [...]
How will the adoption rate of applying analytics accelerate? Who in an organization might emerge as the primary driver? Will it only be the CEO? Analytics is certainly embraced in functions such as marketing for customer and prospect analysis and as risk management. Is it possible that the CFO function might emerge as a key [...]
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 [...]
Last week I spoke for IIA at Predictive Analytics World. Whereas I often speak to executives who aren’t yet persuaded of the virtues of analytics, at this gathering—which also included attendees of the Marketing Optimization Summit and Text Analytics World—that wasn’t the problem. I was preaching to the converted, who already undertake a wide variety [...]
