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AI is a hot topic and we get asked a lot by clients how they can succeed with AI or cognitive technology. There’s often a sense of panic – “everyone is doing AI and we’re not!” – and a sense that they have to start a completely separate initiative, throw money at it and hope [...]

I caught up with the folks from Conductrics to learn about their 3.0 release (I have blogged about Conductrics before). Conductrics has been in the decision optimization business for many years now. At its core Conductrics is about assigning customers to experiences. They recently released 3.0 with some new features. Conductrics Express is a point-and-click [...]

Last session for me at IBM’s World of Watson is the keynote from IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty. Another very slick video on the different ways IBM’s cognitive, cloud and analytic solutions are being used around the world got us started. And again, IBM emphasized “with Watson” as part of their ongoing positioning of Watson as additive to people, [...]

Continuing in the analyst program at IBM’s World of Watson event with Beth Smith, GM Offerings and Technology for IBM Watson, introducing some Watson elements for Conversation – one of the four C’s of Watson (Cloud, Content, Compute and Conversation). Watson, at its core, is about finding knowledge in noisy data at enormous scale. Watson listens to [...]

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 am attending IBM Insight 2015 and will blog about a few of the sessions. First up, the opening keynote on the insight economy. IBM is focusing on the disruption caused by analytics and insight across all industries. Internal and external data and increasingly sophisticated analytics are changing how companies interact with customers, manage risk [...]

I got a quick update on TIBCO Spotfire recently having last been updated on TIBCO Spotfire 6.5. Since then TIBCO has acquired Jaspersoft and created their TIBCO Analytics group. In addition TIBCO has been taken private though no organizational or business strategy changes have resulted. The various analytic products continue to be fairly independent though [...]

Second day at Insight 2014 and the opening keynote is about transforming your industry. Mike Rhodin kicked things off by discussing how people think – by observing, interpreting what we see based on our experience and biases, and then we decide what we are going to do.  But there is a limit to how well we can do [...]

IBM recently introduced a Predictive Customer Intelligence solution. Like the counter fraud solution earlier, this is one of IBM’s multi-product and services signature solutions. The focus of this solution is the increasing need to be truly customer-centric, focusing marketing on individual customers not on segments or campaigns, not on pre-existing mental models or ideas. This matters [...]

Next up is a client panel with Verizon, FleetRisk Advisors and UBS AG. Verizon has created a specific Big Data and Analytics R&D group to diversify their portfolio of services, looking for new opportunities in data and analytics to leverage Verizon’s DAILY 12PB of data. FleetRisk Advisors is a business founded on predictive analytics for the trucking industry [...]

Rob Walker kicked off day 2 of PegaWorld talking about Decision Management and the role of analytics in customer engagement. He began by talking about John Boyd and his theory of engagement – the OODA loop – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (something I referenced in Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and [...]

Lisa Kart, Roy Schulte and Teresa Jones of Gartner recently published Find the Best Approach to Decision Management. It’s a great piece and if you are a Gartner subscriber you should definitely read it and share it around your organization. Even if you are not you should seriously consider getting it from Gartner as it makes [...]

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, [...]

I got an update from Convergys on their real-time decisioning engine recently. Convergys is a services company with 75,000 customer management employees across 69 contact centers around the world. They provide contact center outsourcing, technologies for customer contact centers and customer experience analytics. Convergys’ technologies are designed to support contact centers, covering IVR, campaign management, [...]

I am giving a webinar about Oracle Real-Time Decisions on June 25 at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern I will be joined by Nick Engelhardt of Oracle. We will discuss the benefits and applications of decision management and how decisions made using big data and analytics are transforming today’s dynamic customer experiences at the moment of impact. Topics will [...]

I got a chance to catch up with Via Science recently [Post updated June 2014 to reflect some changes in terminology]. Via Science is focused on “Big Math” for “big data.” They see big data companies spanning from data collection to search/storage to analysis/visualization. Big Math – the category in which they like to put [...]

A solution-focused session next with Marcus Hearne talking about analytic marketing solutions. Marketing remains focused on its traditional imperatives – how to focus on customers to maximize the value of each interaction, how to measure effectiveness, what marketing mix to use etc. However the new empowered, social consumer is putting pressure on marketing as people [...]

Jason Verlen and Bernard Spang took one of the breakout sessions on analytic innovations. IBM, as noted yesterday, sees a progression of analytics from descriptive to predictive, prescriptive and ultimately cognitive. The purpose, of course, of big data and analytics is to drive better decisions. Managing big data is a necessary step but acts only [...]

Bob Picciano and Les Rechan came up next to discuss Big Data and Analytics: Fueling Competitive Advantage in the New Era of Smart. Five years ago IBM launched the Smarter Planet initiative. On a smarter planet, they say, everything is connected and instrumented and this is reflected in the explosion of Big Data. To drive value [...]