At the Journalism Interactive 2014 conference, Derek Willis spoke about interviewing data, his advice for becoming a data-driven journalist. “The bulk of the skills involved in interviewing people and interviewing data are actually pretty similar,” Willis explained. “We want to get to know it a little bit. We want to figure
In my previous post I started a discussion of graph analytics in which connections and links among different types of entities can be analyzed to find patterns that lead to actionable intelligence. But before we can explore the details of the types of analyses to be performed, we must first
With all the industry emphasis and collateral available on high performance analytics, business intelligence and visual analytics, it can be difficult to know exactly where to begin, especially if you don’t have a team of statisticians standing by. Thankfully, analytics covers a huge range of opportunities to empower your business, and
I don't know about y'all, but I have quite a few customers embarking on some type of conversion. Some are converting from one CRM software system to another CRM solution, and others are doing database conversions. Whatever type of conversion you are doing, you may want to consider conducting a "readiness" in
Every business, regardless of size and sector, is subjected to continual change. Business models are constantly evolving and adapting as consumers react to new technologies, laws and trends. Take a look at Amazon as an example. It has adapted its business model in an agile fashion by offering streaming of
These days, many organizations define themselves in terms of their impact on the environment. Naysayers may dismiss companies like Starbucks, UPS and others as engaging in PR stunts. Still, the fact remains: there's potential competitive advantage to be gained by being carbon neutral – or at least by ostensibly caring about
In physics, antimatter has the same mass, but opposite charge, of matter. Collisions between matter and antimatter lead to the annihilation of both, the end result of which is a release of energy available to do work. In this blog series, I will use antimatter as a metaphor for a factor
One of the benefits of the disruptive nature of emerging big data platform technologies is that the combination of scalable performance and lowered costs for high-speed memory opens the door for addressing business problems in ways that used to be too computationally-intensive to roll out on a broad scale. One good example
Data migrations can be challenging initiatives at the best of times, but when they start to go wrong they can be devilishly difficult to turn around and keep afloat. In this article I share three simple ideas that may help you gain control of the project and bring that go-live date
Early in the terrific book What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, he discusses the concept of Paleolithic Rhythm, which describes the short bursts of intense effort followed by long periods of rest employed by the hunter-gatherer tribes of early humans during the Paleolithic Era. Paleolithic Rhythm is also an apt analogy for how many
