Privilege and responsibility: reflections on a career

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|August 7, 2012

With so much global change and innovation going on, some readers seek understanding to make sense of it all. I try to meet that need with my blogs and articles. However based on reflections of my childhood followed by a forty year working career, I write this piece about my [...]

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Why Will Analytics Be the Next Competitive Edge?

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|July 3, 2012

  Bob Thompson, the CEO and founder of the popular website CustomerThink.com has published an e-book, Profiting Big Data – 10 BIG Ideas, compiling ten articles from authors. I am honored to have my article as Chapter 1. You can download the e-book for free by clicking on the book title [...]

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Analytics is like a dentist. It’s all in the inside.

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|June 19, 2012

My cousin Chris is a dentist. We are the same age, and we lived together when we were both in graduate school at Northwestern University. Chris was in dental school, and I was earning my MBA. Chris once said to me that dentistry is all on the inside. Of course [...]

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Horse racing’s Triple Crown – just like business analysts*

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|June 5, 2012

The Kentucky Derby and Preakness horseraces, the first and second legs of the USA’s prestigious Triple Crown races, have been run. The winner of both races, I’ll Have Another, will be trying to win horseracing’s famous Triple Crown by winning the Belmont, but he will need to again outrun the [...]

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Analytics and EPM – You’ve read me, now hear me

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|May 29, 2012

I wrote my first weekly SAS blog in February 2007, almost 5 ½ years ago and have rarely missed a week. So you have read me. In this blog I deviate from the normal for you to hear me. I discuss business analytics and enterprise performance management (EPM).   INFORMS [...]

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Being wrong versus being confused

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|May 22, 2012

Which is worse? Being wrong or being confused? Let’s start with some definitions.  To make a wrong decision means you were mistaken and erroneous. Your decision was incorrect for the problem to be solved or opportunity that could have been realized. (There is also an immoral, unethical, and illegal connotation; [...]

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Analytics for creating more choices

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|May 15, 2012

Choice covers both the capacity to control people and events, and an underlying belief in the possibility of such control. Being able to rule your environment gives power to self-determination, even for babies. In a study, researchers attached strings to the arms of infants “as young as four months.” When [...]

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An analytics story problem: When will two trains collide?

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|May 1, 2012

I recently presented a keynote presentation at the annual conference of the joint Ohio chapters of the Institute of Management Accountants. I shared the stage with Mike Willis, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the founder of and Chairman Emeritus of XBRL International. Mike posed this question to make an important point:   [...]

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Please put the shower curtain inside the bathtub!

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|April 24, 2012

I take risks as a blogger to use blog titles, like this one, that does not indicate the blog’s topic. So many readers will likely not read them. In addition, some of my blog do not contain “keywords” like business analytics for website search engines to detect and drive more [...]

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Business analytics is a big sham and over-rated!

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|April 1, 2012

UPDATE: For anyone who comes across this post later in the year and might have cause for concern, please be sure to read the last paragraph, which includes the punch line for an annual April Fool’s joke that I play on my readers. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Analysts probing rationally integrated limits for [...]

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