Can Information Governance Help Me Find My TV?
USA reported an interesting story about a musician who ordered a Westinghouse TV from Amazon (purchased from a third party provider).
Some of you probably did that yourself over the holidays. He anxiously waited for the big box to arrive. Instead, a much smaller box appeared on his doorstop.
Hmmm. Perhaps, he thought, this is a single component for the TV? Cables or a stand? Reasonable guesses.
Nope. Not a TV at all—instead, it was a black, semiautomatic gun. Imagine his surprise! Thankfully, the Washington, D.C. musician did the right thing and called law…
What Data Science Can Do To Become A Classic
When I wrote “Data Science: Buyer Beware,” I was certainly not expecting a spirited, standing ovation, as would follow a Scriabin performance by Vladimir Horowitz.
Despite presenting a sharply contrarian view, I nevertheless expected to be largely ignored, with potential readers favoring articles about various gadgets, 3D printing, the deconstruction of Silicon Valley celebrities, or what the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show augurs for civilization.
Not surprisingly, the disaffection of those in the data science field quickly lit up the blog space and Twitter. Most appeared inclined to react; but as press time…
Brain Scans Show No Difference In Pie Chart And Bar Chart Perception?
It has long been an article of faith in the visualization community that bar charts are better than pie charts because they allow people to compare amounts more easily.
“Pie charts communicate information poorly… Our visual perception is not designed to accurately assign quantitative values to 2-D areas” says visualization expert Stephen Few in his book “Show Me The Numbers.”
The book backs up the claim with a compelling example that I’ve attempted to recreate below — which of these two charts do you find it easier to interpret?
Putting The Business In Business Intelligence
Business insight happens when we least expect it, and it certainly doesn’t wait on IT support.
The most compelling of all the reasons an Aberdeen Group report cites for adopting visual and interactive business intelligence (BI) as part of a BI strategy, giving business managers the tools to explore their ideas in real time – without waiting eight days for IT to add a column on a report. The trend was clear in 2011 and has only evolved since: best-in-class…
Business Intelligence 101 — Time to Start Your Installations!
Congratulations, you’ve just bought enterprise-wide business intelligence (BI) software!
Someone made the decision to purchase it (maybe you were even involved.) And you’re going to help install it.
Who Do You Help First?
Finance. Always help finance. They hold the purse strings, they make the happy happen. When it comes to pleasing people inside of any organization, finance should almost always be at the top of your list. The nice thing is, the reason isn’t always political.
Everyone expects finance reporting to be available out of the gates. Nobody buys an enterprise-wide business intelligence…
Data Geeks Get It Right Again
The recent US presidential election puts one more nail in the coffin of managing by gut feel. Weeks prior to Election Day, the data indicated a victory for the sitting President.
Business leaders still on the fence about whether to invest seriously in analytics technology need only look at the U.S. presidential election last month to see the need to jump quickly and deploy state-of-the-art analytics tools. Although I am not an American citizen, like many outside the U.S. borders, I watched the election with some fascination, not because I favored one candidate or another, but because it seemed…
KPI Dashboard A Must For SMBs To Drive Business
When most people think about a big data environment they envision a classic 3-V situation: a large enterprise wrestling with massive volumes of information, arriving at incredible velocity and comprised of a wide variety of data types.
But small business owners experience big data in similar fashion, despite obvious differences in volume, velocity and variety metrics.
I’ve written here before about how small businesses generate data from many new sources—Google AdSense, Amazon partnerships, Facebook pages, and more—and the opportunities they gain in terms of marketing, planning staff levels, and improving sales. What…
Knock It Out Of The Park With Your Analytics
Depending on who you believe, an investment in analytics can yield up to a 10x return.
But that’s a little like saying the batting average for Major League Baseball is .245, when in actuality it ranges from .197 to a phenomenal .336 – an outlier contributed by Buster Posey, of the World Series champion San Francisco Giants. (You can probably figure out who my team is!)
That average represents a pretty big difference in results, and the same thing happens with investments in analytics. Why are the return swings so…
Analytics Could Save Social Networks As Marketing Tool
To tweet or not to tweet? If you do, analytics could help refine your social media marketing strategies.
This has been a difficult year for social media. Google+ has been declared a ghost town. Twitter’s data center glitches have raised questions about the stability of its infrastructure. General Motors pulled its display advertisements from Facebook because marketers there were not convinced they worked. And, of course, Facebook’s long anticipated IPO underwhelmed investors.
Perhaps the most devastating news this year for social media advocates, though, came from Forrester. The research firm studied two weeks of online…
Predictive and Proactive: Leveraging Advanced Analytics
For centuries, humans traveled the Earth’s seas, guided only by their experience in reading the stars, the temperature, and the currents. Rarely could they anticipate the unfolding often life-and-death situations they were steering into.
Today, our ships travel the world guided by technology that scans present conditions and reads evolving water, weather, and seismic patterns. With such insight, captains can safely guide their vessels to any global destination.
Seeing Beyond Yesterday
Rarely can today’s business decision makers get the same type of insight. Rarely can they lead with the same confidence. Every day, unanticipated…
Finding Meaning in “Meaningful Use” for Electronic Health Records
Doctors and their staff members can be set in their ways, because they know from experience that those ways allow them the time needed to focus on patient care. And for anyone on the front lines in healthcare, that’s what matters.
IT, healthcare, and my attitudes have come a long way in the intervening years. And as we all hear more about the potential of electronic health records (EHRs), I’m curious about what they mean for patient care.
The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provides…
NFL’s MVP: Analytics and Mobility
The National Football League’s (NFL) 2012 season is far from over. But already it seems that a handful of teams are leading the pack – because of their investments in big data analytics and mobile applications.
Before the 2012 season began, a few teams— including the San Francisco 49ers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Cincinnati Bengals – ramped up their IT systems to roll out the NFL’s first generation of digital playbooks.
Of these few, only the 49ers are taking this functionality to the next level: The team recently began working with SAP to…
Election 2012: Voters Turned Off By Political Promotions Tailored To Them
86% of Americans say they abhor political promotions tailored specifically to them as individuals
Next month voters in the United States will cast ballots for the next president of their country, among other political races and referenda. What is different in this election year than in previous presidential contests is social media and what campaigns can do with the data generated there. Although Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites existed in the 2008 election, they did not have the massive membership that they do today, and Google+, with its growing 400 million users, did not exist.
In 2012, social…
The Odds Favor a Career In Analytics
Serious students, particularly at the graduate level, don’t roll the dice with their futures. They consider the job landscape, potential pay, career growth and more when they decide what field to study. There are many fruitful choices to make while in school that will lead to satisfying work later, but analytics is likely to be one of the best choices in the coming years.
As we know from the now famous McKinsey & Company report Big data: The next frontier
for innovation, competition, and productivity, in the United States alone as many as…
A Brush With Genius: Analytics Help Detect Art Fraud
Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with a Reaper, 1889
Image credit: MicheleLovesArt/Flickr
When those of us in the analytics field think about fraud detection, we generally focus on credit card fraud. That’s where big data and real-time analytics benefit business and society every single day. But there’s an emerging fraud-detection market for big data analytics that involves far fewer transactions, yet still involves big sums of money: fine art fraud detection.
Forgeries can sell for…
A Nose for News: Analytics-Inspired Journalism
Most of what passes for news follows the well-trod path of he-said/she-said journalism. A reporter gets an assignment, interviews as many people as possible, then fills the story with on-air or in-print quotes woven together by the traditional who, what, where, when, and, maybe, why of the news.
The data, if any, comes from the story’s sources. On occasion a journalist will back up assertions by referring to census figures, government studies, or analyst research. But editors want stories with quotes far more than ones…
Small Business: Seeding Growth With Analytics
Not that long ago, business intelligence systems were out of reach for most small-to-medium-sized companies (SMEs). For most SMEs analyzing data was not as critical as simply processing it through business applications. From a proprietor’s perspective, any data analysis that Excel couldn’t handle probably was not worth the time.
That’s all changed. Today, SMEs are awash in data from multiple sources. Beyond their own internal applications, they collect data on visitor activity to their websites. They use data-driven services from online critical business services such as Groupon, Google’s AdWords, and Amazon.com’s Associates programs. SMEs are among the fastest growing segment…
Who Makes the Decisions: You or Your Software?
Automating certain tasks can save a ton of time and money. But it can make you less efficient, too, if you’re not careful.
Reaching a decision before acting seems about as commonsense a notion as you might find. Would you send salespeople out to make calls before deciding on the type of product you want to sell, a price point, or the nature of your target audience? Absolutely not. Doing so would be a frightening waste of time and resources.
And yet, according to decision management automation expert James Taylor, with whom I…
Evolving the Perfect Stress Test
Citigroup needed something positive. It reported increased revenue and profit during its Q1 earnings last Monday, which is fortunate, given that “the global banking group could use some good news to counter the disappointment after it recently failed the Fed’s stress test,” Forbes noted last week.
Stress testing, or the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR), is a rigorous examination that delves into the health of banks via 25 crisis-simulating variables. Such variables include 13 percent unemployment and a 50 percent drop in equity prices. The test is meant to inspire confidence that…
Make Good Decisions: 4 Tips
Wise decision making is not a constant, research shows. But you can set yourself up for success in these straightforward ways.
Judgement counts. We all make a lot of decisions in business and like to think that we make the big ones with enough time, care and attention that we can be reasonably certain that they are rational, consistent and safe. But just how consistent and careful are we? How far are our decisions influenced by external trivia?
Read more on Inc.com
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