Strategy

I got my hands of a copy of Krishna Pera’s new book, Big Data for Big Decisions recently. I met Krishna several years ago when he published some articles on being decision-driven not data-driven and on why it’s essential to prioritize decisions for your analytic efforts. He’d found some of my articles on being decision-centric [...]

Balancing multiple profit drivers is essential in many high volume, transactional decisions targeted with Decision Management. Being able to execute decisions, monitor their effectiveness, learn what works, and systematically improve your decision-making results in significant business benefit. Mathematical optimization let’s you go even further. We recently published a new white paper – The Customer Journey [...]

A new white paper outlines the journey to optimal decisions and the role of mathematical optimization in getting the business results you want.

Recently we have posted on the Decision Management Solutions blog about a couple of interesting pieces of McKinsey research that discuss the unfortunate truth – most companies are NOT succeeding with advanced analytics. First, there’s this general research How More Companies Can Maximize the Potential of Analytics: “Senior executives tell [McKinsey] that their companies are struggling to [...]

IBM is hosting an event on its AI strategy. Rob Thomas kicked off by asserting that all companies need an AI strategy and that getting success out of AI – 81% of projects fail due to data problems – involves a ladder of technology with data at the bottom and AI at the top. It’s [...]

Analytics are only valuable if your enterprise’s decision making changes for the better. You need to build an analytic enterprise that leverages analytics to inform strategy, empower people, and especially drive systems.  An analytic enterprise uses analytics to solve its most critical run-the-business problems, and uses increasingly advanced and diverse analytics to maximize its ability [...]

Silvie Spreeuwenburg of LibRT came up after lunch to talk about a rules-based approach to traffic management. Traffic management is a rapidly changing area, of course, thanks to IoT and self-driving cars among others. When one is considering traffic, there are many stakeholders. Not just the road user, also businesses reliant on road transport, safety [...]

Last day of blogging from Building Business Capability and the first topic is modern business architecture with Gagan Saxena, VP of consulting at Decision Management Solutions, and Andrew Ray of Goldman Sachs. The presentation is focused on a new approach to business architecture to address problems in the legacy approaches – one that connects business at rest to business [...]

Continuing in the analyst program at IBM World of Watson we got an update on the evolution of IBM’s Cloud Platform from Bill Karpovich. Cloud, he says, is strategic. Vendors must disrupt with cloud or be disrupted by it. Over the last few years, cloud has evolved from efficient public cloud infrastructure to new applications [...]

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors kicked off the day at IBM’s Process Summit talking about digital transformation and business processes.  Neil began with a key point – that “Digital Transformation” is more than just hype but that it is also a complicated and multi-faceted concept. Companies are being digitally disrupted because the internet and mobile [...]

I participated in a webinar Building Outstanding Customer Relationships: Delivering Relevant Next Best Actions for Retail Bank Customers with Steven Noels of NGDATA. We discussed next best action marketing, where each customer becomes a “segment of one” versus a “segment of many,” improving marketing action precision and relevancy. Implementing next best action marketing requires the right technology to give you [...]

I am co-hosting TDWI’s Solution Summit on Business Innovation through Analytics and Big Data Architectures with Philip Russom, April 10-12 in Savannah, GA Business, analytics, and big data are colliding to create new and innovative ways of running a business, regardless of organizational size or industry. From one direction, organizations are collecting data from new sources, [...]

I got an update from CRIF recently. CRIF is headquartered in Italy with $450M in revenue and 1,884 employees. They have customers in over 50 countries, offer credit bureau services in over 15 countries and credit decisioning solutions worldwide. Most customers are financial institutions though they have customers in other industries such as telco, utilities, [...]

Jeff Ma, he of the book Bringing Down the House about winning at Blackjack, gave the closing keynote on advanced analytics. First he asked what can you learn from Blackjack Reduce the casino’s (or your competitor’s) edge For instance basic blackjack strategy executed perfectly reduces your losses by 50% Avoid omission bias People favor risk [...]

Ron Bodkin of Think Big (founded in 2010 and acquired by Teradata in late 2014) came up next to talk about their consulting practice around hadoop and other big data infrastructure. They are now over 100 people (on shore and off shore) with a 100% focus on Big Data technology. They are run largely separately [...]

Day two of the Teradata Influencers event started with Hermann Wimmer, co-president. Hermann gave us an introduction to the overall company strategy. Teradata has two co-presidents, one focused on data and analytics and one focused on marketing applications with some shared services. This allows  them to focus on the three markets there see for their [...]

Shanker Ramamurthy kicked off the session, describing how, as the world’s economy is digitized, the use of Big Data and analytics to compete in the new real-time economy becomes essential. The latency with which enterprises much develop and implement solutions is collapsing to zero. Customers are demanding more value for money at the same time, requiring not just faster [...]

I recently did some work with the folks at SAS on Decision Management and they helped me create some new decision management assets. We recorded three short webinars on core decision management topics: Operationalizing Analytics With Decision Management. Where decision management fits in your analytic environment. How to modernize analytical business processes. The value of operational analytics. Manage Business [...]

Next up at the Alteryx Influencer Summit was a discussion of the overall growth strategy from Rick Schultz and Paul Evans (Marketing and Sales). Most of this is under NDA, as you would expect, but Alteryx was willing to discuss how they have been improving their customer acquisition approach: A laser focus on the business analyst as their [...]