My friend and IIA colleague Eric McNulty is right in his recent post that there is a lot of talk about analytics in Washington these days. I was there for a SAS event a couple of weeks ago, and it was interesting to think about all the areas where it’s popping up. Eric mentioned health [...]
Semi-Automated Social Media Analytics
June 27, 2010 By 1 Comment
There is a lot of chatter these days about analytics related to social phenomena: social media analytics, social network analytics, etc. My impression (after talking about it with some folks who specialize in such things) was that there was more talk than action on the subject. But I keep hearing about organizations that are actually [...]
Geeks Making a Difference
April 20, 2010 By 2 Comments
I’m on my way home from the INFORMS Practice Conference in Orlando . A subtitle for it might be “Geeks who make a difference.” The meeting is a celebration of operations research (OR) and its application to organizations and decisions. If you’re not familiar with OR, it’s probably one of the oldest forms of analytics, [...]
Food Lion Exec Describes “Bootstrap” Analytics
April 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment
At a “Competing on Business Analytics” event sponsored by SAS and Accenture in Chicago this week, Mike Haaf, former Food Lion SVP of Sales, Marketing, and Business Strategy, described a broad and successful program of analytical marketing and operations at the Carolina-based grocery retailer. When Haaf arrived at the company in 2003, its performance was [...]
The Importance of Interfaces to BI Tools
March 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Cindi Howson has a new report out about the importance of interfaces to BI tools. Cindi does good research, and I don’t disagree with her methods or conclusions. However, it’s worth pointing out a few issues with regard to interfaces for analytical software: Visual analytics are very appealing, but it’s difficult to visualize complex statistical [...]
2010 Looking Good for Analytics
January 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Making Better Decisions
November 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment
A Brave New (Financial) World
May 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
How will financial services organizations handle complex analytical decisions in the future? How our financial institutions made decisions about their operations and customers is at the heart of the financial crisis we’re in. Managers of these institutions entrusted decisions to analytical models they didn’t understand. Regulators allowed banks, rating agencies, and nonbank financial firms to [...]
Predictive Analytics vs. Reactive Analytics
March 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Today everybody is talking about predictive analytics, and it’s undeniably desirable to be able to predict the behavior of customers, employees, voters, or other sources of uncertainty. However, while predictive analytics are always difficult, they are particularly difficult in the current economic crisis. If you’re trying to predict the future behaviors of customers based on [...]
Principles of the New Business Intelligence
March 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Business intelligence–and its predecessor concepts decision support, executive information systems, and so forth–have been circulating for several decades in business. However, I don’t think it’s ever fully worked. What we’ve done is to throw data (often in the form of difficult-to-navigate data warehouses) and software tools at business users, and said “Go at it.” That’s [...]
