Privacy is always a flash point. With the advent of big data, privacy is only going to be even more of a concern. The fact is that many sources of big data contain highly detailed information on what people are doing. While there are many very valid uses for most of these big data sources, [...]
What Does It Mean To Analytic Professionals? For my first blog posting, I decided to focus on one of the hottest topics in analytics right now: “Big Data”. Big Data is typically defined as very large, newer sources of data that don’t necessarily have a convenient or consistent structure. Think web logs, sensor data, RFID [...]
Will the next 007 be schooled in analytics? Perhaps. The U.S. government is reportedly making a nine-figure investment to better understand how language shapes worldviews with the goal of improving its ability to glean intelligence from non-English speakers. It’s known as IARPA: Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. In an article on The Atlantic‘s web site, [...]
We tend to assume that executives want the right answers about what’s driving their businesses, and that they will gravitate toward analytics as a means to provide them. However, that isn’t always the case, and probably should never be assumed. Here’s an example. A few weeks ago, at a conference for financial executives interested in [...]
Analytical Candidates You May Not Have Considered I’ve been thinking about the problems many of us have in recruiting analytical talent since IIA’s 2011 Predictions webinar. Talent acquisition and talent development are topics that tend to spark passionate debate; even Jim Goodnight and William Green spent time on the topic at their keynote during the [...]
Could analytics dramatically remake your water bill? That’s just one of the questions that came up this past week when I spent a day at a Sustainable Cities conference hosted by the Australian Trade Commission and others. We’ve wrestled with the analytics of sustainability on this blog before. We’ve debated various rankings and the value [...]
Recently, when Assurant Solutions compared decisions made by highly trained experts with decisions made by ‘silicon-based intelligence,’ computerized judgments based on analytics, they were able to double and in some cases triple relevant performance metrics. That’s the story told in a recent Sloan Management Review article, Matchmaking with Math: How Analytics Beats Intuition to Win [...]
The health care reform debate is once again roiling the U.S. House of Representatives as the new Republican majority moves on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act passed just about a year ago. Their act is called the Repealing the Job Killing Health Care Act Bill and proponents of repeal say that doing [...]
The PUPD framework can help you understand where to take action and where to invest to optimize your analytics initiatives.
A recent court decision may have wide-reaching implications for analytics and data mining. In 2007, Vermont enacted a law that prohibited prescription drug data aggregators from selling their information to drug manufacturers for marketing purposes. According to the Courthouse News Service: Pharmacies collect information about the prescriptions they fill, including prescribing doctor’s name and address; [...]
