consumer

Webinar on decision-centric business design with business rules

May 14, 2012

I am giving a webinar with Gagan Saxena (@Gagan_S), CIO of Apple Vacations on A New Approach to Business Design at Apple Vacations on May 22, 2012 at 10:00 am PT, 1:00 pm ET.
Gagan and I will present how how Apple Vacations applied Decision Management to redesign the consumer experience and create a “smart system” that would bring [...]

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IBM IMPACT Day 2 Keynotes

May 1, 2012

Johan Gerber of MasterCard kicked things off on day 2. MasterCard does not actually issue the cards with their logo on, they are a technology company that provides a network to link consumers, 32,000,000 businesses and 22,000 card issuers. The network is very high performance, handling 100 pieces of information and processing each transaction in [...]

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IBM IMPACT Forbes Mini Main Tent

April 30, 2012

The Forbes Mini Main Tent was kicked off by Mike Perlis, CEO of Forbes. Mike focused on how to build a business as strong as the Forbes brand – something with four legs:

Keep print business on track
Build the digital business for growth
Develop brand extensions like conferences and international
Become a great technology company

This last one is [...]

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IBM IMPACT 2012 Opening Keynotes

April 30, 2012

After a great introductory session from Walter Isaacson (biographer of Einstein, Franklin and Jobs), we kicked off the main session at IBM’s largest IMPACT conference with over 8,500 attendees with a focus on re-thinking IT.
Marie Wieck started by discussing how core applications are changing. IBM claims that $5Trillion run on IBM hardware. These systems must [...]

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Live Event: IBM IMPACT – From Business Rules to a Decision-Centric Organization

March 26, 2012

[ April 30, 2012; 3:45 pm to 5:00 pm. ] Session 2420 at IBM’s IMPACT is titled “From Business Rules to a Decision-Centric Organization” and is being presented jointly by me and a client of mine – Gagan Saxena of Apple Vacations.
Apple Vacations is expanding its B2C business by improving consumer experience, adding intelligent personalization and dynamically creating product packages – a dramatic shift from [...]

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Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit Opening #smarteranalytics

March 20, 2012

Steve Mills kicked off the IBM Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit. Business Analytics matter, he says, as shown by the focus of CEOs (8 out of 10 expect complexity to increase, enterprises applying analytics are more successful etc). The need for analytics is pervasive, with every industry seeing a massive expansion in the volume of data [...]

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Business Analytics in Action at SAS

February 27, 2012

This session is focusing on three specific functional areas – customer intelligence, financial crimes/fraud and risk management.

Customer Intelligence
The landscape of Customer Intelligence involves the growth of empowered consumers thanks to the proliferation of channels, the explosion of data and the evolving CMO role as they have to balance analytical and creative. SAS’s vision is to [...]

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Enabling Business Analytics at SAS – Business Visualization

February 27, 2012

Four themes in business visualization:

Consumer-oriented BI
Walk up and use, understanding through visualization, self-service
Deriving value from big data
Analytics and visualization that scales with in-memory
Approachable analytics
Integration into the user’s world
Outlook, Office, mobile

The new product (coming in March) has four components:

Environment Manager for setup and monitoring
Visual Analytics Explorer for ad-hoc analysis and discovery
Visual Design for report design (web or [...]

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First Look – Zoot

February 9, 2012

Zoot was founded in 1990 and has been providing hosted decision management solutions since 1992. With a focus on financial services, Zoot’s clients include 3 of the top 5 U.S. banks and they work with clients of all sizes and across all lines of business.  Instant credit decisioning is one of their critical offerings, but [...]

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Giving retail banking customers what they want

January 2, 2012

Jim Davis of SAS had an interesting post back in October - What do retail banking customers want?- in which he talked about the results of some consumer surveys and the banking industry’s response. The three results Jim discussed were clarity and fairness, easy access and quality customer experience. Interestingly I see all three of these [...]

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Predictive Modeling Tools for Analytic Teams #FICOWorld

November 3, 2011

The other session I got to see at FICO World was a panel discussion on analytic modeling tools with representatives from UniCredit (Italy), Ferratum (Finland), Nedbank (South Africa), and Citi.
Challenges and rewards of building an analytic modeling team

Always start from scratch with fresh, inexperienced teams and this is both challenging and rewarding
Challenges are personal and [...]

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Adaptive Control in Collections at a US Regional Bank #FICOWorld

November 3, 2011

Time for a quick session or two at FICO World. Chip Clarke and Andrew Beckman presented on the use of customer-level TRIAD to continuously improve their collection results for their retail banking products – to do “Adaptive Control”. Adaptive control, for those not familiar with the term, means continually challenging the way you make decisions [...]

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First Look – Causata

August 11, 2011

Causata is a software company founded in early 2009 with a heritage from the online space – behavioral targeting on the web and database marketing. They are headquartered here in Silicon Valley with engineering in London and the team has experience across companies like Touch Clarity, Omniture, Interwoven, DoubleClick, RedHat, Skype, eBay and others.
Causata sees [...]

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Social Media Analytics with IBM

June 2, 2011

IBM sees Social Media Analytics as part of Customer Analytics rather than as a separate category – the reason for analyzing social media is to better understand customers and what they are thinking. It is not enough, says IBM, to understand and analyze social media. This understanding must be integrated with other kinds of analytics [...]

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Operational Intelligence Panel

April 29, 2011

A panel of customers (TXU Energy, Pfizer, NY State Dept Taxation and Finance – one of my favorite Decision Management stories and included in this white paper for instance) discussed how to link processes to performance management with Daryl Plummer  of Gartner and the folks from ebizQ. No attempt to make a coherent story, just [...]

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Leveraging customer data to drive business decisions

April 5, 2011

Interesting panel with folks from the Venetian, Marriott and Nextag discussing customer intelligence. First they were asked about their use of analytics:

Nextag is an online comparison shopping engine that assembles data from 10,000 merchants online for consumers. They make money by buying clicks on search engines and then getting payments from merchants for referrals. The [...]

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SAP Run Better Tour – Geoffrey Moore

February 23, 2011

After yesterday’s sneak peak the BI 4 launch event – the “Run Better Tour” – kicked off this morning with the main tent event. Geoffrey Moore focused on changes in enterprise IT – specifically the move from what he calls systems of record to “systems of engagement” driven by the consumerization of IT. Enterprise IT [...]

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Analytics and the art of selling

November 23, 2010

I saw this interesting McKinsey piece recently – Rediscovering the art of selling – McKinsey Quarterly – Retail & Consumer Goods – Strategy & Analysis – and I was struck by the value of analytics in this context. What retailers really need to do, according to McKinsey, is focus on hiring sales people with personality, [...]

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Happy world statistics day!

October 20, 2010

It turns out that today is World Statistics Day (according to my friends at SAS, who have a page all about it). The focus of the day is on the value of official statistics. So, if you are working for a governmental or non-governmental statistics organization, have a nice day
If you don’t work [...]

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First Look – Runa

October 12, 2010

Runa was founded a couple of years ago to solve the problem of very low conversion rates on most e-commerce websites. Companies spend lots of money driving people to their websites but only 2-3% convert to buyers. One of the biggest reasons for this is shopping cart abandonment – people put goods in their cart [...]

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