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What’s Your Deployment Score?
Analytics, we have often assumed, is all about modeling, statistics, and algorithms. The more generous explainers of the field would admit that it is also about data—the integration, cleaning, and massaging of it. Few, however, think first of “deployment” when the subject of analytics is raised.And that is a problem.
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Finance Must Ramp Up Role As Analytics Leader
The fictional crime-solver Sherlock Holmes once referred in a conversation to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” A Scotland Yard detective replied, “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes retorted, “That was the curious incident.”In the field of analytics, the equivalent of the dog that didn’t
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Garbage In, Garbage Out: Design Process Survey
My name is Brian T. O’Neill, and when I’m not getting paid to strike percussion instruments in musically appealing ways, I run an independent design and UX consultancy called Designing for Analytics that specializes in custom enterprise data products and analytics apps. IIA recently invited me to write a guest
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Jump Proudly on the AI Bandwagon
When I talk with analytical professionals about artificial intelligence, many are reluctant to claim expertise in the area or bill themselves as AI practitioners. “I don’t want to appear to be just jumping on the bandwagon,” one told me recently. They may see the enthusiasm for AI as somewhat faddish,
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When Big Data Can't Predict
Most people think that in the age of big data, we always have more than enough information to build robust analytics. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. In fact, there are situations where even massive amounts of data still don’t enable even basic predictions to be made with confidence. In
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Ethical Implications of Industrialized Analytics
As analytics are embedded more and more deeply into processes and systems that we interact with, they now directly impact us far more than in the past. No longer constrained to providing marketing offers or assessing the risk of a credit application, analytics are beginning to make truly life and
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Data Preparation: Is the Dream of Reversing the 80/20 Rule Dead?
I recently had someone ask me, “For years we’ve talked about changing analytics from 80% data prep and 20% analytics to 20% data prep and 80% analytics, yet we still seem stuck with 80% data prep. Why is that?” It is a very good question about a very real issue
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Breaking Analytics Out of the Box - Literally
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
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Pssst... How Much Money For Your Personal Data?
We’re all generating a lot of data about ourselves and how we live day to day. There are personal fitness devices, preferences and opinions expressed on social media, details on when we’ve come and gone from the house from our security systems, and more. It isn’t just data that companies
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Approach Big Data Analytics Like a Lego Kit
A few months back I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine, Brad Elo. We were discussing the importance of operationalizing analytic processes and the need for the use of repeatable and standardized components to enable success. As part of the discussion, Brad brought up a terrific parallel