One of the most celebrated instances of data driving decisions at the front lines is CompStat: the effort led by then-New York City Police Chief William Bratton to put police resources where there was the most crime. He did that by instituting extensive analysis of crime statistics (CompStat is short for Computer Statistics) and holding [...]
We encourage our members to submit guest posts for the IIA blog. Today’s is from Don Ryan, Senior Partner, iKnowtion One could argue that the Age of Analytics dawned in 2004 with the publication of Michael Lewis’ entertaining book on baseball called Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Readers of this space are [...]
We’ve all be in positions where we had to make tough calls. When they go right, you are a hero. When they don’t, well… In case you missed the latest installment of “The Rivalry of the Decade” in the National Football League — the New England Patriots vs. the Indianapolis Colts — let me set [...]
On the heels of the passage of a health care reform bill by the U.S. House of Representatives comes a profile of Intermountain Healthcare, a group of hospitals and clinics located in Utah and Idaho, in the New York Times Magazine. If you’ve been following the U.S. health care debate (those of you from the [...]
As much as marketers love tailored ads, consumers don’t agree — especially when they find out about the tracking that lies behind them.
An editorial in today’s NY Times laments the loss of locational privacy thanks to swipe cards, cell phones, and toll transponders. The author asks legitimate questions: how many appications link “who” with “where” unnecessarily and for how long does this information need to be stored? Analytics-based competitors need to take heed for a couple of [...]
Advances are being made in the quest to be able to analyze unstructured data (like blogs, forums, etc.) as rigorously as traditional, structured data.
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google in today’s New York Times front page story on the demand for data savvy grads. “And I’m not kidding.” Demand for quants is growing, as we in analytics have known for some time. [...]
Paul Wilmott, in a recent New York Times editorial, put forth the argument that financial trading by algorithm has gotten so fast that it threatens to bring down the entire system: “If a fall in the market leads to people selling according to some formula, and if there are enough of these people following the [...]
The consolidation in the business intelligence software space continues with IBM’s announcement that it will acquire SPSS, Inc. for $1.2 billion. According to the New York Times, Jim Davis off rival SAS, the largest supplier in the market, “The attractiveness of these companies ‘reflects the increasing pressure by senior management of corporations for ‘tighter, fact-based [...]
