social media

Transformation in the era of big data and analytics #iod11

October 25, 2011

Steve Mills opened up the discussion talking about Big Data, making the point that the art of the possible when it comes to data has been growing steadily for many years – though the current explosion in data is pretty impressive. For instance 1.3B RFID tags in 2005 and 30B in 2010, 4.6B mobile phones [...]

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Trends in smarter business analytics

September 19, 2011

Don Campbell, CTO Of IBM’s Business Intelligence group, presented on trends in smarter business analytics. He sees four focus areas – improving customer understanding, optimizing real-time decisions, better enterprise visibility and improved collaboration. All underpinned by managed, trusted data. IBM’s customers tell them that the 3 big challenges are

A lack of understanding of how to [...]

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Computerworld BI Keynote – From Business Intelligence to Predictive Analytics

July 25, 2011

[ September 19, 2011; 8:45 am to 9:30 am. 8:45 am to 9:30 am. ] I am giving the opening keynote at the Computerworld BI & Analytics Perspective Conference on September 19 2011.

The data you have, the way you analyze it, and the way you act on this analysis drives better business outcomes. To make the most of your data you need to do more than just adopt predictive analytics [...]

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Many Kinds of Analytics, One Approach to Maximize Their Value

June 21, 2011

Working with clients it is clear that the interest in analytics has never been greater than it is today. Yet there is still confusion about what analytics means. We have web analytics to analyze logs and clickstream data to optimize websites; data mining and predictive analytics to analyze structured data to segment customers and to [...]

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IBM thoughts on Predictive Analytics Futures

June 2, 2011

IBM identified three big trends in predictive analytics that will drive some of its development efforts around predictive analytics:

New Data
New data types such as images and video as well as new sources like RFID and mobile devices must be accounted for and become part of how predictive analytics are built. Access to this data is [...]

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Smarter Customer Analytics and Decision Management with IBM

June 2, 2011

We got a quick overview of SPSS Decision Management (see my post on SPSS DM 6 or indeed the whole blog for my view of this). SPSS Decision Management combines predictive analytics, business rules and optimization/simulation to optimize high volume decisions like “should I search this car at the border” or “should I investigate this [...]

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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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Predictive Analytics spotlight from IBM

June 2, 2011

Deepak Advani kicked off day 2. SPSS was acquired by IBM in 2009 and, like all acquisitions, has to report on how well it has met the expectations set at acquisition time. SPSS has beaten every target set for it at acquisition and reviews have apparently been a “bit of a love fest”. SPSS has [...]

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IBM’s Big Data Platform and Decision Management

May 24, 2011

IBM has recently announced a new strategy for bringing Big Data to the enterprise. In particular this includes InfoSphere Streams v2 (announced April 12) and InfoSphere BigInsights 1.1 announced today. Big Data is an issue, of course, largely because the amount of data available to organizations is growing rapidly. Surveys show that many managers already [...]

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SAS product portfolio and roadmaps

March 7, 2011

Warning, long post follows – SAS has a lot of products and even this summary was a lot. A big session on the product portfolio – 2010 and 2011 highlights in some specific focus areas. New releases in 2010 included:

Customer Link Analytics – released in Q1 this product focused on using links between customers to [...]

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SAS Inside Intelligence 2011 – Executive Viewpoioint

March 7, 2011

I am attending the SAS analyst day this week – SAS Inside Intelligence.
Jim Goodnight kicked off the SAS analyst event. Numbers look good for a tough economy – 5.2% worldwide growth in US Dollars or 6.7% without currency fluctuation. Latin America, Canada and Asia Pacific were all very strong but regions were good across the [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – multi-channel distribution and customer communication

February 22, 2011

Insurers face an explosion of direct sales channels: websites, mobile and call centers, with the rapidly evolving world of social media opening up even more opportunities. Driving consistent customer treatments and profitable direct sales across dynamic distribution channels, while effectively managing risk, is a huge challenge. As Deb pointed out, linking all customer communication together [...]

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First Look – Attensity 5.5

February 16, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with Attensity after a long absence recently (I last blogged about Attensity in 2008). Attensity has been doing text analytics and customer experience monitoring for 10 years or more. Their approach includesfour steps –  Listen, Analyze, Relate, Act (from a decision management perspective it is nice to see [...]

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First Look – SAS Customer Intelligence

January 4, 2011

I got a quick update from the customer intelligence folks at SAS recently. Customer Intelligence is SAS’ largest solution line (with dedicated sales, marketing and engineering) and they are projecting to have a record year in 2010. SAS describes their SAS  Customer Intelligence Suite as providing three core benefits for organizations, each based on a [...]

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Here’s why you should refuse requests for reports!

November 9, 2010

One of my favorite web analytics bloggers, Avinash Kaushik at Occam’s Razor had a great post recently – Rebel! Refuse Report Requests. Only Answer Business Questions, FTW. In this post he argues that web analytics professionals should refuse requests for reports like

How much traffic is coming to our website?
I want a conversion rate
I want a [...]

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Customer intimacy #bas2010

September 29, 2010

Customer intimacy is a hot topic these days. Customers are getting more complex because not only are they using multiple channels but because they have multiple online personalities – work, home, on behalf of a parent or child and so on. The fact that consumers trust each other (78%) but not ads (13% trust for [...]

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Lyzasoft Update

July 28, 2010

Some weeks back I got an update from Lyzasoft but I have not been able to post it until now. I first wrote about Lyzasoft back in 2009 and since then the company has been busy. The company’s vision remains the same – to create a way for end users to work with BI that [...]

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Teradata Customer Management Portfolio

April 27, 2010

Marc Schroeder presented on Teradata’s customer management portfolio – Teradata Relationship Manager (TRM).  Clearly the move to multi-channel, customer-centric customer relati0nships and the growth in data and behavioral data particularly are driving new demands in customer relationship software. Vision:
Maximize customer profitability by enabling a comprehensive interactive marketing environment that manages intelligent customer dialogs, leverages behavioral [...]

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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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SPSS on what your customers tell you #pawcon

February 16, 2010

Eric Brethenoux of SPSS was up next talking about analytics using what your customers tell you. Customer segments are inherently blurred because they are a composite. Identifying the people behind a segment is hard and increasingly more difficult as the number of brands, devices, channels, media and social networks are exploding. And people have multiple [...]

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