We’re pleased to have a guest post this week from Kaiser Fung, a business statistician and author of the new book, Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do. He has written a series of posts on his blog recording his thoughts as he makes his way through [...]
We hope that you had a chance to catch the recent Harvard Business Review webcast with Tom Davenport, Analytics at Work: How to Make Better Decisions and Get Better Results. Just in case you missed it (or want to share it with a colleague), here is the link to download the MP3 version. The one-hour [...]
Rarely has a product announcement been as anticipated, hyped, and speculated upon as much as Apple’s launch of the iPad last week. One would have thought the device had the potential to cure world hunger and put an astronaut on Mars at the same time. While the iPad met with many oohs-and-ahhhs, some yawns, and [...]
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, [...]
Ah, it is as old as the chicken-and-egg debate: when is intuition your best guide and when should data drive your decisions? Enterprise 2.0 guru and Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management Andrew McAfee recently weighed in recently on the Harvard Business Review blog: “Human intuition can be astonishingly good, especially after [...]
We had the chance to listen to David Plouffe, manager of the Obama presidential campaign, who was in town to talk about his new book, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory. It impressed that the book may be a bit of a Moneyball with a political twist: [...]
Why do organizations continue to make a high number of “bad calls”? Tom Davenport argues that it is, in part, because they’ve failed to reengineer their decision making processes.
Making better decisions — it is the ultimate goal of any analytics initiative and the passion of analytics’ executives. After all, there is no sense in crunching data just for the sake of crunching. No, we want to enable the decisions that boost revenue, cut costs, and deepen customer relationships. Eric Siegel, the conference chair [...]
From The Next Big Thing, my blog at Harvard Business: Microdecisions for Macro Impact When companies or pundits talk about decisions, it’s easy to get focused on the major ones made by senior executives. It’s true that big decisions around restructurings, mergers or acquisitions, and strategy can create or destroy a lot of value. However, [...]
