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 [...]
There is a referee’s penalty in the sport of American football called “piling on.” It is for unnecessarily jumping on a ball carrier who has already been tackled by others. There has been so much written about analytics that I fear if I add more, then I will be accused of “piling on.” But in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
What a change a few decades makes! When first starting my career as an analyst, I had no illusions about what I was getting into. I was choosing a field that most people didn’t enjoy or even understand. I knew I would get to work on neat analytical projects, but realized my role (and those [...]
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 [...]
