As we approach Father's Day 2015, I recall that many years ago when I was in high school and college my dad had lots of ideas about what I should do with my life. Many of these career ideas were influenced by whatever recent magazine article he had read. Among his
Recently, I had an opportunity to participate in an analyst briefing around the Internet of Things (IoT). During the review, a chart was shown to summarize the status of IoT projects in the manufacturing sector. I wasn’t surprised by the varying degree of “completeness” of IoT projects across this industry, but
The metaphors we choose to describe our data are important, for they can either open up the potential for understanding and insight, or they can limit our ability to effectively extract all the value our data may hold. Consisting as it does of nothing but electric potentials, or variations in
Who is your best customer? The answer to this question can vary dramatically depending on your industry. A retailer’s best customer is someone who comes back to their store over and over again. A gym owner’s best customer could be considered consumer who pays their monthly on time but never
People are such an important aspect of data analytics. I was reminded of this at the recent Strata+Hadoop World event, where I saw first hand that the UK is indeed facing the same skills gaps as elsewhere in the world. Perhaps that didn’t surprise me, but I also noticed the
My previous blog posts here for marketing have centred on data-driven marketing themes and how marketers can exploit data and analytics to create a more customer-centric, fact-based culture. And by extension, how this, combined with quality execution is likely to lead to better customer experiences and improved customer equity. This
Did you know that the education industry is heavily embracing data visualization to run their business? Just like any other industry, leaders in education need to understand their customers (i.e. students). They need to understand how the students are doing, how they're progressing and if intervention is needed to ensure
Still think business intelligence (BI) and analytics are only for big companies? The truth is, small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) can benefit from BI and analytics in a big way. Digital disruption Thanks to innovative new developments SME’s (and small teams who haven't yet gotten IT’s attention) can now
How is it that some companies can come up with a big idea and implement that idea successfully in the market, while others never get past the idea phase? "In the case of innovation," says Jill Dyché, VP of SAS Best Practices, "big ideas aren't enough." It's also not enough
For health and life sciences organizations, discussions about big data include gaining value from that data in the form of real-world evidence. Consider for a moment the amount of healthcare data that exists today thanks to the adoption of electronic health records. Then think about the future with data from
