Super Crunchers

Make Better Decisions

November 17, 2009

Tom Davenport published a new article recently in the Harvard Business Review titled Make Better Decisions. In it he gives some examples of bad decisions and asks why this decision-making disorder?
First, because decisions have generally been viewed as the prerogative of individuals—usually senior executives. The process employed, the information used, the logic relied on, have [...]

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Analytics – the dark side?

July 21, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Oz Analytics – The Darker Side Of Analytics was an interested little post discussing the risk of using analytics to, in this case, to profile potential criminals based on past behavior. The use of analytics to predict crime and criminals is certainly growing and, as Steve said in his post, you have to
wonder [...]

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Do not underestimate the need for automation in decision making

April 20, 2009

Tom Davenport wrote a nice piece last year that recently showed up on my radar – 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence – on HarvardBusiness.org. His first principle was particularly good:
Decisions are the unit of work to which BI initiatives should be applied.
Whether you are just looking to make your reporting and dashboards more [...]

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Live from BIWA Summit – Competing on Analytics

December 2, 2008

At the Business Intelligence Warehousing and Analytics Summit at Oracle today. BIWA is part of the Oracle User Group focused on BI, analytics and data warehousing. Jeanne Harris of Accenture (author, with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics) started off the day. The subtitle of her presentation is “Building Competitive Strategies Around Data-driven Insights”.
Analytics are [...]

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Gartner, BI and Smart (Enough) Systems

May 5, 2008

Two of Gartner’s smartest analysts – Kurt Schlegel and Gareth Herschel (shameless plug) – just published an excellent little paper called “Business Intelligence and Decision Making“. This paper was one of Gartner’s Strategic Planning Assumptions and the (free) summary says:
A subset of organizations that seek a competitive advantage will evolve the primary role of their [...]

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Live from InterACT – Ian Ayres

April 28, 2008

I started with an interesting breakfast this morning with Ian Ayres and Larry Rosenberger. Ian is the author of Super Crunchers (reviewed here in the wiki) and Larry is a research fellow and ex-CEO of Fair Isaac. The two of them were great conversationalists and we ranged across randomized testing (adaptive control), the power of [...]

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Gartner BI – wish I was there

April 1, 2008

I was checking out Doug Henschen’s interview of Kurt Schlegel – Gartner BI analyst – and page 2 was particularly excellent. Kurt clearly understands the value of being decision-centric and the need for BI to broaden to include rules and predictive analytics. And he plugged the book too, which is always appreciated. It’s a pity [...]

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The future of intelligent businesses may not be BI

October 29, 2007

Several posts caught my eye last week while I was at the Business Rules Forum on the topic of Business Intelligence (BI) and made me wonder if “BI” is the best way to build an intelligent business. Claudia Imhoff started me off with an article on Operational Business Intelligence – A Prescription for Operational Success in which [...]

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Better decision-making can boost your top line

October 18, 2007

I saw this post by Keith Harrison-Broninski Some Processes Cost Money – Others Processes Make Money, in which he discusses the fact that companies have already squeezed lots of costs out of their systems and processes. He takes away from this the valid conclusion that not all processes are therefore good targets for high ROI [...]

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Book Review: Super Crunchers

October 16, 2007

Super Crunchers: Why thinking by numbers is the new way to be smart
Ian Ayres book, Super Crunchers: Why thinking by numbers is the new way to be smart, is another book extolling the virtues of data-driven decision making. In that regard it is very similar to Competing on Analytics. The book focuses in on the [...]

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