recommendations

First Look – Rapid-I

March 27, 2012

Rapid-I provides open source software for predictive analytics, data mining and text mining. Incorporated in 2006, they are based in Dortmund Germany and have been working on RapidMiner since 2001. They have over 35,000 production deployments and more than 400 customers in 40 countries. Banking and financial services is their largest market followed by Pharma [...]

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Webinar: Models Collecting Dust? How to Transform Your Results from Interesting to Impactful

January 11, 2012

[ March 14, 2012; 10:00 am to 11:00 am. ] I am giving a webinar on Thursday March 14, 2012 10 am Pacific with Revolution Analytics on “Models Collecting Dust? How to Transform Your Results from Interesting to Impactful”
Data scientists sometimes lament, “Why can’t I get anyone to use my predictions?” Great models that make accurate predictions are sometimes disconnected from organizational decision-making. This hurts [...]

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Here’s how to use Decision Management to improve cross-channel experience

August 29, 2011

Retailing today had an interesting article – “Best Buy, Sears, Target tops in cross-channel performance” – about the importance and challenges of becoming a cross-channel retailer. I was struck by the potential of Decision Management Systems to improve cross-channel experiences in a couple of key areas:

60% had inconsistency across in-store and online promotions;
Obviously inconsistency is [...]

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Role of Business Intelligence in process improvement

April 29, 2011

Bill Gassman spoke on the role of Business Intelligence – BI – in process improvement. Bill means “big BI” – everything to do with intelligence about your business, the discipline of BI and analytics, not just a “BI” product. The road to intelligent operations he says has “haves” and “have nots” – some have BI [...]

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First Look – Opera Solutions

March 3, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with Opera Solutions recently. A company that aims to improve “machine intelligence” and couple it with human insight to help companies with sustained profit growth, Opera has 400 staff worldwide with over 125 analytic scientists. This makes it a very large analytic solutions provider in a market dominated [...]

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PARC Research – Exploiting unstructured data for predictive applications #pawcon

October 20, 2010

Bo and Lawrence from PARC presented some work on contextual intelligence research designed to exploit unstructured data for novel predictive applications. PARC is now an independent business unit focused on the Business of Breakthroughs, working with Xerox and with other companies. The new focus means they work on a wide range of problems and aim [...]

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Oracle – Recommendation engine for OpenWorld #pawcon

October 20, 2010

Mark Hornick of Oracle’s Data Mining Technologies Group presented on the use of the Oracle Data Mining technology to drive recommendations at Oracle OpenWorld (OOW). The challenge in a show like Oracle OpenWorld is that there are thousands of sessions and attendees need help finding the sessions that will match their interests. Three groups were [...]

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First Look – Portrait Software

October 19, 2010

Portrait Software, now part of Pitney Bowes Business Insight – has a tag line of “Make every interaction count” so, with my focus on micro decisions, I wanted to get an update. Since the early days of Quadstone (acquired by Portrait some years ago) the focus of this team has been to help people get [...]

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Oracle RTD Roadmap #oow10

September 20, 2010

The Oracle Real Time Decisions (RTD) roadmap began with a quick review of Oracle RTD (see my earlier post on the role of RTD in e-commerce) – an analytical decision service that sits between the operational and analytic applications of an organization so that operational business processes can be analytically enhanced. Crucially it combines prescriptive [...]

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Pegasystems and Chordiant – an update

September 14, 2010

I got an update from Pegasystems recently, mostly to talk about how the integration of Chordiant is going. I shared my original thoughts on the Pegasystems/Chordiant combination at the time but this was my first chance to chat with them since then.  Pegasystems continues to do well with its  12th record revenue quarter and climbing [...]

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First Look – DataInfoCom

September 1, 2010

I caught up with DataInfoCom recently – a research-oriented software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Their focus is on what they call Predictive Decision Management. Their software product, OSMOSYS, delivers predictive decisioning over the Internet – Decisions as a Service or DaaS as I call it. Their customers include a couple of well known, Fortune [...]

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Decision Management and reforming hospitals

August 17, 2010

The McKinsey Quarterly had a nice piece on Reforming hospitals with IT investment that contained a great paragraph:
Combined with clinical-decision-support (CDS) tools that give physicians best-practice guidelines for medical procedures and with stricter coding classifications, electronic health records not only broaden access to medical information but also serve as a forcing agent [...]

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Zappos (and others) and business analytics

April 1, 2010

Meri Gruber had an interesting post on her Competing on Execution blog this week – Zappos: Make Me Happier with Business Analytics – that prompted me to want to add my own thoughts. She says:
Why is Zappos only offering me help from other customers, when they are sitting on a wealth of order (and [...]

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First Look – SAS Real Time Decision Manager

January 19, 2010

SAS Real-Time Decision Manager (RDM) is designed for inbound communications, complementing outbound communication solutions. It aims at real-time delivery of decisions and recommendations during a customer interaction to optimize that interaction to improve revenue, growth and retention. For example, in retail banking, a customer might come in with a new job with very different income [...]

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Recommendation Engines- not as Complicated as You Think

July 15, 2009

Some time ago I saw this interesting little post -Recommendation Engine Secrets We Don’t Want You to Know: It’s not as Complicated as We’d Have You Think – that made the point that:
Most recommendation engines use one of a handful of methods that are well understood
And they are correct, of course. Recommendation engines involve some [...]

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First Look – Oracle Real-Time Decisions 3.0

June 24, 2009

I got a chance to get an overview of the latest release of Oracle Real-Time Decisions, 3.0. This is the platform for real-time decisions on which various applications (for call center, web etc) are built and sold as part of the Oracle Applications suite.
The vision of this product is to optimize “return on attention” – [...]

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First Look – SPSS PASW Decision Management Solutions

May 1, 2009

SPSS Inc. likes to say they focus on helping customers capture all the information they need, predict outcomes and then, using their Decision Management products, act on these insights by embedding analytic results into business processes. Within this family, the PASW Decision Management tools add actions, business rules, to analytics to enable action to be [...]

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When the customer knocks you need decision management not operational BI

March 10, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
A friend passed on an article titled “When the customer knocks” in which Scott Arnett of Pitney Bowes discussed the power of data to improve customer interactions. Nothing there to cause me to blog you would think. Except that Scott, like too many in the Business Intelligence community, fails to acknowledge that using [...]

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5 ways to reduce cost with predictive analytics

February 19, 2009

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
I am blogging live from Predictive Analytics World on behalf of SmartData Collective. Hopefully there will also be some podcasts. First up is Eric Siegel, program chair and President of Prediction Impact for the event.
Eric defines predictive analytics as “business intelligence” technology that produces a predictive score for each customer or [...]

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