I am the Director of Marketing Strategy for the EMEA region at SAS Institute and have more than 25 years experience in IT and computing systems. My current role is focused on supporting SAS’ regional marketing operations in developing marketing strategies and programs aligned around the needs of SAS’ markets and customers.
If, like me, you have children who are old enough to vote, you may have noticed what I have noticed. They’re different. They seem permanently connected to their friends via social media, rarely watch the news or read a paper, and they have many transient interests that seem to follow
When you Google “big data,” you get big data about big data. We are living in the age of information overload, which creates many challenges, including big data, information silos and integration issues. It was my great pleasure to introduce a panel of experts at The Premier Business Leadership Series
In a business environment that is increasingly global and technological, many businesses are finding themselves subject to two significant challenges: If your product or service can be “made,” it can be copied and someone else can make it cheaper and/or better. Customers are becoming ever more knowledgeable about products, vendors
I had the pleasure to be the host of the Risk and Finance Insight Session on the second day of The Premier Business Leadership Series, where we discussed the subject of enterprise risk management and financial stewardship. With global, political and financial upheaval becoming the norm (and during the conference
In his new book, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, world renowned theoretical physicist and futurologist Michio Kaku shared his view, and those of 300 other global top scientists, about what is in store for the rest of
To re-use an old phrase: “May you live in interesting times.” And we certainly do. Today, Fareed Zakaria addressed these interesting times in his keynote address at The Premier Business Leadership Series, titled "A Roadmap Out of the Economic Crisis." Asked, “Which one of the following economic regions do you
Last year Jim Goodnight shared the stage with Bill Green (the then CEO of Accenture) and talked about what it takes to build an analytical organization. This year Dr. Goodnight was with Pierre Nanterme, the current CEO of Accenture and they talked about what it means to lead an analytical
One of the astonishing benefits of my job is getting to travel to beautiful places around the world to meet with customers and prospective customers at The Premier Business Leadership Series conferences. This year is no exception, the historical city of Antwerp as our backdrop, where hundreds have gathered to
Organizations have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet they often fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But analytics is enabling many firms to aggressively use their data in key business processes with impressive results. You have more information at hand about your business than ever before,
Monster.com was the pioneer in the online recruitment industry. To maintain its competitive advantage more than a decade later, the company has taken the data-driven road using research, business intelligence and predictive analytics. Jean-Paul Isson, Vice President of Global BI and Predictive Analytics at Monster Worldwide spoke today about how
Balancing the short term with the long term has never been easy, and during a time marked by significant uncertainty in global financial markets, it just got harder. Organizations worldwide are searching for signs of stability, while weighing the risks of pursuing new opportunities against cautious steps that recognize continued
On Wednesday the 23rd June, Tom Davenport, best-selling co-author of Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work and President's Distinguished Professor at Babson College, led a masterclass of 20 business leaders in examining how organisations go from being analytically impaired to analytical competitors. In Tom’s view, most companies have massive
In his introductory address, public sector session moderator Thomas Spiller of SAS neatly summed up some of the biggest challenges faced by national governments: dealing with the current economic climate and managing a crisis of confidence within their governments. In his experience, government responses seem to fall in to three
This is the second entry in my series interpreting what it means for Chief Marketing Officers to become analytical marketers. Part 1 in the series, which covered planning, can be found here. This post describes phase two, the project kick-off. I'll start by listing phase two objects, and then provide
In their book Analytics at Work; Smarter Decisions, Better Results authors Tom Davenport, Jeanne G Harris and Robert Morison describe a 5-stage process to becoming an Analytical Competitor. In this series of articles, I am going to describe my interpretation of what it means for CMOs to become analytical marketers,
Yesterday at The Premier Business Leadership Series, I had the tremendous pleasure of attending the panel debate Balancing Intuition and Analytics in Decision Making. The panelists were: Malcolm Gladwell - Best-selling author of Outliers: The Story of Success, Blink and The Tipping Point; Tom Davenport - Best-selling author of Competing
Business leaders, who wish to base their decisions on fact and logic rather than emotion or instinct, probably follow a thinking process that lends itself well to the application of business analytics: What has caused this issue to be brought to my attention? If not from an external source (e.g.
I was reading an article in Project Manager Today magazine (more interesting than it might sound) about 'Unknown Unknowns and Risk' and it made reference to Donald Rumsfeld's infamous comment about "we know there are some things we do not know". Actually, he was making sense in a garbled sort
I've been spending the last few months working on a major business transformation programme, and it's an exciting place to be. As part of the steep learning curve involved in adapting a generic approach to something specific for the programme I find myself occasionally having an "ah ha!" moment -
In the UK there is debate forming about how best to target benefits on the most deserving cases without building a dependency culture. For some time the UK Government has been using 'means tests' to ascertain whether a claimant needs State support, or whether they have independent resources that they
The majority of governments around the world are parties in a 'social contract'; simply put, citizens give them permission to raise funds through taxation etc, decide on policy (what to spend the money on) and then invest or disperse funds on their behalf. However, many governments are faced with increasing
