BI and better business decisions

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|April 11, 2012

Last week marked my four year anniversary with SAS, and I have to admit that prior to joining, the phrase “business intelligence” was not in my vocabulary.  I understood “analytics” just fine, and knew long before my hiring interview that it definitely didn’t mean spreadsheets.  I knew what “performance management” [...]

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Conversational analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|March 28, 2012

When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus.  But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than [...]

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Can you draw this dog?

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|March 14, 2012

If you ask any four year old, and I know this for a fact since I once taught preschool, if you ask any four year old if they can draw, sing or dance, they will look at you as if you had lost your mind.  OF COURSE they can draw / sing [...]

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Black holes and Integrated Business Planning

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|January 4, 2012

Black holes can be completely defined by just three properties; make that four if you count their blackness. The three properties are mass, electric charge and angular momentum. That’s it. No matter what falls into a black hole, the only quantities and qualities retained are its mass, net charge and [...]

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Attack of the 50 foot Cliché!

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|December 13, 2011

The role of the CIO is changing. Or was that the CFO? The CEO maybe? Somebody’s role is changing, that much I do know. How many times have you read just such an opening statement in an article or white paper and muttered “duh?” to yourself before moving on to [...]

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I wonder what the king is doing tonight

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 15, 2011

Yes, that’s me, as Don Quixote, singing ‘Dulcinea’ from’ Man of La Mancha’ in a Broadway-themed variety show benefit concert (sort of like “Glee” for forty-to-fifty-somethings) raising money for anti-malaria netting in Africa (I did this as a medley along with ‘I, Don Quixote’). The total amount raised was over [...]

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Normal accidents, Risk, and the Man who Saved the World

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 1, 2011

If you are feeling out of sorts, a bit down and out, and want to take it all the way to full-blown depression, have I got a book recommendation for you: “Normal Accidents”, by Charles Perrow (1984). Perrow’s premise is that we have designed certain systems, nuclear reactors being his primary [...]

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Encountering analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|October 19, 2011

In his recent article for the McKinsey Quarterly, entitled “The Second Economy”, W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute states, “In any deep transformation, industries do not so much adopt the new body of technology as encounter it, and as they do they create new ways to profit from [...]

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Playing 'Marco Polo', and other forecasting approaches

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|September 13, 2011

Here is a four-stage approach to financial forecasting. I urge you to seriously consider adopting at least level 1, then next look at how layering on the other stages might transform your approach to business planning. The four stages are: (1) Multiple Forecast Inputs,  (2) Marco Polo,  (3) Driver-based forecasting, [...]

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Meet George Jetson - Customer Profitability Optimization

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|August 18, 2011

Take a quick look at the two graphs below. Which one appears to be the LEAST complex construction? You might initially suppose it’s the bottom one, nothing but bar graphs, and maybe just one bar graph, the tallest one on the far right, broken into its constituent segments moving towards [...]

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