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Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri asks “if analytics does not lead to more informed decisions and more effective actions, then why do it at all?” Specifically in a great post What Exactly The Heck Are Prescriptive Analytics? he says (emphasis mine) Prescriptive analytics is about using data and analytics to improve decisions and therefore the effectiveness of actions. Isn’t [...]

An additional blog post here on a session at Building Business Capability that I missed – Business Analysis for Data Science teams. I know Susan Meyer who presented it and we talked several times about her presentation. It’s a really key topic so I wanted to present a summary. Here goes: There is a lot [...]

The folks over at ZS Associates sponsored a study by the Economist Information Unit on analytics titled “Broken Links: Why analytics investments have yet to pay off”. This report showed the classic challenge of analytics – 70% think analytics is very or extremely important but only 2% say their analytics efforts have a broad, positive impact. In [...]

Besides working on Real World Decision Modeling with DMN  I recently contributed a piece on the use of decision modeling for framing predictive analytics to The Big Analytics Book, a book being produced by the folks at AnalyticsWeek. AnalyticsWeek rounded up 60+ thought leaders in analytics, including yours truly, and got us all to write a [...]

Sometimes Scott Adams just nails it and late last year I saw this great strip on The Generic Graph. Work with analytics long enough and you see something akin to this – something Mychelle Mollot of Klipfolio called Building a One-size-fits-all Dashboard – one of the 6 mistakes she talks about in this article that she pithily summarizes as the “this sucks for [...]

Bill Fair, one of the founders of Fair Isaac, once said that to succeed with analytics you had to “grab the decision by the throat and don’t let go”. As Big Data and analytics become ever more central to organizations, and as more and more money is spent on analytics, this advice seems particularly timely. As [...]

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 [...]

Mark Clare, the Global Head of Data/Information Management and CDO at HSBC, came up next to be interviewed by Jill Dyche of SAS. Mark has been a CDO previously and took his latest role in large part because it is a business role focused on driving data into the operations of several division. He and [...]

I got a briefing from a company that’s new to the US but that I have been aware of for a while – BusinessOptics. The company was founded in South Africa and started about four years ago. The product itself was first released about two years ago and the initial customers are primarily in South [...]

Back in May of last year, Wayne Eckerson published “Making Predictive Analytics Pervasive“. It’s a great report with some really useful data but one of the key headline result is that implementation rates are not rising – in fact fewer organizations are reporting successful implementation of predictive analytics (from 21% to 18%). This despite the [...]

One of my students at UCI pointed me to this great Seth Godin post: Don’t measure anything unless the data helps you make a better decision or change your actions. If you’re not prepared to change your diet or your workouts, don’t get on the scale. Seth’s always worth listening too (I regularly quote his blow [...]

One of the students on my UCI Class Business Goals for Predictive Analytics quoted his mentor in a discussion we were having about cross-referencing metrics or KPIs with the decisions that influence them.   Only measure those things you are willing to change and be willing to change the things you measure.   I really [...]

Since I last wrote about 11 Ants they have increasingly focused on retail analytics to help retailers make the most of their transactional data and loyalty program data. 11 Ants new Retail Analytics Platform is designed to address a number of initiatives in retail – integrating customer behavior deeply into metrics, being consistently customer-centric across [...]

TIBCO Spotfire 6.5 (announced last month) has new capabilities around easier access to data, location analytics and R. To support effective data discovery and visualization, TIBCO believes it is essential to allow users easy access to analytics against the increasingly wide range of data sources that are available. It’s not enough that the visualization tools [...]

SAS® Model Manager is getting an update soon to release 13.1 (I last blogged about Model Manager 3.1). The vision of SAS Model Manager going forward is to streamline the integration of predictive modeling into the overall environment, make it easier to operationalize analytical models, expand the model portfolio management capabilities and improve governance and [...]

I am speaking at the SV Forum Business Intelligence SIG on Decisions First: How to stop wasting money on Big Data – April 15 at 6:30pm at SAP’s Palo Alto location. Big Data is hot. Organizations are dealing with greater volumes of data, more variety of data and data that arrives with increasing velocity. These “Big [...]

I have been interviewing analytic practitioners periodically – last year I interested Andrea Scarso, CEO of MoneyFarm and more recently I interviewed Tracy Allison Altman, co-founder of Ugly Research.  Next up is Nauman Sheikh, a seasoned professional of Data & Analytics. Nauman was introduced to me by a client who really liked his book Implementing Analytics: A [...]

I recently gave a webinar with Jan Purchase of LuxMagi on Agile and Cost Effective Financial Compliance (recording here) and thought I would highlight some of the key challenges in compliance: Scale, Transparency, Consistency, Agility and Effectiveness: Scale There are more and more regulations that involve an increasing number of rules to ensure compliance. Decision Management, and decision [...]

Last year I interested Andrea Scarso, CEO of MoneyFarm, about analytics. This was a hugely popular post so I thought I would continue the series this year by interviewing some other analytic practitioners. The first in this continuing series is an interview with Tracy Allison Altman, co-founder of Ugly Research. Ugly Research are developing PepperSlice, [...]