Posts tagged as:

tom davenport

SAS and Accenture announce partnership

February 17, 2010

Accenture and SAS announced today that they will jointly create an analytics group focused on financial services, healthcare and public service. They describe this as a “significant evolution of the existing relationship between the two companies”. The release is at  http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/AccentureSASAnalyticsGroup.html
This is obviously an interesting announcement. Ever since IBM announced its new Business [...]

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Operational decision making as a corporate asset

January 27, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
I often tell companies and other organizations that they should treat decisions and decision making as assets. In Smart (Enough) Systems, the book I wrote with Neil Raden, we said
Operational Decision Making as a Corporate Asset
If operational decisions must be made well for your organization to deliver on its strategy, they [...]

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Book Review – Analytics at Work

January 26, 2010

I received a pre-release copy of Tom Davenport’s new book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. The book is a follow-on to Competing on Analytics (reviewed here) and is a shorter, pithier book than its predecessor. Once again Tom collaborates with Jeanne Harris and this time Robert Morison of the Concours group. Where the [...]

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Analytic truth and myth

November 19, 2009

Alison Bolen posted a nice list of analytic truths, or perhaps myths, on the SAS blog today and asked what people thought. I was, of course, unable to resist:

To make analytics successful, the CEO has to have a personal interest in it. MYTH
While it is true that the only companies I see who have made [...]

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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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Balancing Intuition and Analytics in Decision Making #PBLS

October 29, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell, Thornton May (author of The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics)and Tom Davenport (author of Competing on Analytics, reviewed here) made up a high powered panel for this. Various random comments follow:

Healthcare is being used as an example by the panel as an obvious point where analytics and expertise intersect. There is a [...]

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Optimization and Business Processes

May 6, 2009

ILOG and XM presented on optimization and business processes. Optimization in this context is about mathematical optimization aimed at decision support or Operations Research. Creating plans and schedules to optimize use of resources. Optimization helps business create best possible schedules or plans, explore their alternatives and understand trade-offs between conflicting goals. For instance, how much [...]

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Dashboards should do more than raise your blood pressure

April 24, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
This headline came from a briefing I got from LucidEra about their spring release and was so good I just had to use it. Think about it – if all a dashboard does is stress you out and raise your blood pressure by telling you what’s wrong without giving you any help as [...]

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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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Decision Management focuses on Microdecisions for Macro Impact

March 5, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Tom Davenport had a post today on Microdecisions for Macro Impact that pointed out on the key benefits of decision management, with its focus on operational decisions:
If you can identify a few key microdecisions that can be addressed and improved, you can often dramatically improve performance.
“Micro decisions” is a phrase Neil and I [...]

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Transforming retail with analytics and decision management

January 12, 2009

Tom Davenport has done some research into analytics and retail (reported here: Retailers recognise analytics as key to business transformation. Here’s a quote from the new item:
Retailers today are searching for ways to derive more customer intelligence, marketing savvy and operational insight from their overflowing databases. In addition to acknowledging that the use of analytics [...]

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Making Better Business Decisions in 2009

January 7, 2009

Tom Davenport had an interesting post for 2009 – The Year Ahead: Make Better Decisions – and it prompted me to highlight a couple of things you should definitely be planning to do in 2009.

Make a list of the key decisions that drive your business
Conduct a decision audit, or hire me to, so you know [...]

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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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Decision Management, Tom Davenport and the New BI

December 2, 2008

Tom wrote an interesting post this week on 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence and made a couple of really good points:
1. Decisions are the unit of work to which BI initiatives should be applied.
2. Providing access to data and tools isn’t enough if you want to ensure that decisions are actually improved.
I like [...]

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Great event, nice little discount

September 3, 2008

There is a great conference coming up October 26-30 – not only are Neil and I Co-Chairs but readers of the blog can get a discount. We are presenting twice – A Pre-Conference Tutorial Succeeding as a Decision-Centric Organization and a Keynote Competing on Decisions. Because of this you can get [...]

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4 more days to get a FREE iTouch

June 26, 2008

Remember the 1st Enterprise Decision Management Summit and the 11th International Business Rules Forum ? October 26-30, 2008 at the Buena Vista Palace, Orlando FL. Don’t forget that as a reader of this blog we are able to offer you a special, one-time offer as an honorary member of the Friends and Family of the [...]

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Come to the first ever EDM Summit and a special offer

June 4, 2008

1st Enterprise Decision Management Summit and the 11th International Business Rules Forum
October 26-30, 2008 at the Buena Vista Palace, Orlando FL.
I am pleased to announce that we have published the agenda for the Enterprise Decision Management Summit and Business Rules Forum. This is the first time we have run the EDM Summit and we have [...]

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The most important thing I know about Analytics is that no-one agrees what it means

May 12, 2008

Tony Rose over on Decision Support Analytics had this post where he asked for submissions in a particular format – the one used in the title.
I will post a couple of others this week as I have time. Here goes then with the first one:
The most important thing I know about Analytics is that no-one [...]

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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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Tom Davenport writes about analytics in government

April 27, 2008

I was just pointed to an interesting report that Tom Davenport (author of Competing on Analytics) wrote on Strategic Use of Analytics in Government. The report is available on the businessofgovernment.org website. Tom and his co-author do a nice job of summarizing the various ways analytics can and should be used in government.
While there are [...]

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