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. [...]
The word “analytics” seems to be on everyone’s lips — but how many of those people mean the same thing? The most common usage is associated with Google Analytics largely because it is the most widely available tool. Yet I bet if you took the average GA user and put them in front of a [...]
Five Models for Analytical Organizations One issue that organizations are often interested in is how to organize analytics. In this post I’ll describe five different organizational models; surely one of them will fit your organization. First there is the totally centralized model, in which a group of analysts in a central function serve the entire [...]
A Sure-Fire Way to Deliver Value Interview with CIO Niel Nickolaisen Join us for an in-depth interview with CIO Niel Nickolaisen on Analytics: A Sure-Fire Way to Deliver Value. You will learn why analytics and business intelligence tools are important to you as technology leaders, and how they can be your best friend in delivering value.
IIA is grateful for the underwriting support provided by the analytics industry’s leading service and software providers. Founding Underwriter: SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites [...]
Endeca has made a name for itself in “guided navigation” search (well, not a household name — it was recently called, “one of the larger software companies in Boston that no one has ever really heard about”). It serves online retailers by helping them make their products more findable, including Wal-Mart, Target, Tesco, Home Depot, [...]
If you need to explain analytics to a non-technical audience, this short film courtesy of IBM Social Media may be useful. It’s quite basic but that can be an advantage when presenting to the uninitiated. It is not promotional in any way so don’t be afraid of getting an IBM commercial.
According to a 2009 Cambridge University BI study cited by KPMG in a report on the finance function, “up to 50% of managers place no confidence in the numbers presented to them.” KPMG concludes that this represents a failure of business intelligence systems and processes with the lack of global data sets aligned with business [...]
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 [...]
