International Institute for Analytics

I recently attended my first Teradata Partners Conference, where we hosted a booth at the Teradata Partners Expo Hall. Teradata has been an underwriter of IIA since our inception in 2010. It was a great conference as well as an excellent opportunity for IIA to interact with other analytics professionals. Attendees who visited our booth were excited about the show and enthusiastic about the data and analytics work they are doing at their respective companies.

A new set of international reporting standards goes into effect for Canadian financial services institutions late next year. With those standards come new complexities and risks, new data and analytics requirements, and new business opportunities for banks that can get ahead of the curve by modernizing their accounting and risk management platforms and putting those platforms to innovative use. To explore these challenges and opportunities, IIA spoke with Darryl Ivan, National Lead, Risk Management, SAS Canada.

An IIA client from the Finance industry was interested in how AI and Cognitive Computing are influencing the Financial and Investment Industries.

The maturation of the Internet, the explosion of mobile, and the collapsing cost of cloud computing has led to the the rise of “Digital Native” companies. Founded after the mainstream adoption of the Internet, Digital Natives have been able to build and scale data-centric business models and data-driven cultures that create significant competitive advantage, allowing them to disrupt the markets they compete in. These companies are winning, in part, through targeted applications of data and analytics.

I’ve been actively researching customer behavior in the financial and retail industries for over 30 years now, and what fascinates me the most is determining the leading indicators of future customer choices and interactions. At Corios we call this predictive customer journey analysis. The most important and most elusive part of being responsive to customer journeys is identifying leading indicators. Leading indicators will tell you what each customer is likely to need or want, in advance of the customer making a decision, in a way that gives the firm enough time to prepare and respond with a relevant solution.

The lines between open source and commercial products are blurring rapidly as our options for building and executing analytics grow by the day. The range of options and price points available today enable anyone from a large enterprise to a single researcher to gain access to affordable, powerful analytic tools and infrastructure. As a result, analytics will continue to become more pervasive and more impactful.

A health insurance client was initiating an enterprise data strategy and looking to frame out the key components of that strategy. In this exchange, the client asked how to identify where the current resource/skills gaps are, the next steps to fill those gaps, and what are best practices for beginning this process.

A recent visit to a mid-sized hospital in the Northeast United States provided a number of important insights into how great a problem material handling data integrity is in the daily life of those people who work in operating rooms across the country. The nurses, buyers, surgical techs, operating room specialists, and physicians who work on the front lines of hospitals, are having to deal with massive forces of friction that are reducing their ability to provide top tier patient care.

Artificial intelligence and related forms of advanced analytics hold enormous potential for marketers to expand and deepen customer intelligence, improve business processes, and deliver engaging customer experiences. But many marketing organizations are just getting their feet wet in leveraging these technologies. To learn about the opportunities and challenges, IIA spoke with Analise Polsky, Business Solutions Manager, SAS Best Practices and Jonathan Moran, Principal Product Marketing Manager, SAS Customer Intelligence Solutions.

As insurers expand the applications of analytics across business functions – underwriting to claims to marketing – they have to master the basics – quality data, business and analytical skills, focused strategy. To explore what it takes to operationalize analytics in the insurance industry, IIA spoke with Jim Hulett, Insurance Solutions Consultant in the Global Security Intelligence Practice at SAS.