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” [...]

Post a Comment

Relationships, relevancy, and changing the subject

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 29, 2012

Ten minutes into the first speaker of last week’s conference, I knew exactly what I was going to write about in this post.  The speaker was Rey del Valle, Senior Vice President of Finance for Live Nation, on the subject of “Growth Opportunities in the Music Business”, and I was [...]

Post a Comment

The future is not what it used to be

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 15, 2012

Although he later qualified much of what he said with the statement, “I really never said everything I said”, Yogi Berra is also well known for his famous phrase, “Prediction is very hard, especially about the future”. In an attempt to make Yogi’s dilemma slightly more manageable, three of my [...]

Post a Comment

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 [...]

Post a Comment

Business Analytics for Value Creation

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|August 4, 2011

Welcome to the new internet location for my “Value Alley” blog (same Bat Title, different Bat Channel – remember to bookmark this new site if you are a regular reader. This new WordPress platform should make everything about “The Value Alley” easier for both of us; easier to post and [...]

Post a Comment

Where the Cloud meets Strategy

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|July 9, 2011

Operating leverage is the simple idea that an investment in capital equipment, once made, can be “leveraged” to create continually decreasing TOTAL unit costs as volume increases. The fixed costs invested in plant, property and equipment for a production line that were justified on a volume of, say, 100 units [...]

Post a Comment

A Plethora of Black Swans

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|May 27, 2011

I was under the impression that Black Swans were supposed to be rare. Rare enough to be effectively non-computable by standard methods. Nassim Taleb’s formulation of the Black Swan Theory is comprised of the three traits of: outlier (rarity), extreme impact, and retrospective predictability (i.e. 20/20 hindsight). I write this [...]

Post a Comment

Stop Me before I Forecast Again!

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|April 8, 2011

From the perspective of the FP&A group trying to support the forecast, there are three major mechanical faults with the process: – There are too many line items to be forecasted efficiently and effectively – The mechanics are too simplistic, too naïve (i.e. a single-driver, Cost-per-Person model) – There is [...]

Post a Comment