Capital investment in production capability is the weakest link in the business value chain. It always has been and likely always will be. It’s the driving force behind the tendency towards cartels, collusion and monopolies. While it can make the first entrant into a brand new market, in the long
I recall that in the not too distant past customer segmentation, in its many guises, was once a flavour of the times. Segmentation was (and still is) however, a greatly misused term, with organisations confusing the (correct) approach of offering a strategic view of a customer base with the more
Imagine you are the race director for a Formula One car. Decisions must be made within seconds, sometimes in the blink of an eye. When speed is of utmost importance, it is necessary for race engineers to have all relevant race data at their fingertips. Instead of having a couple of
Okay, let's say your data is in Hadoop. The distributed, open source framework is configured as it should be across low-cost servers and your data is sitting in those clusters. It's been a meaningful effort to get to this point but how does it benefit your organization? If it's not doing something
Back in January, I told you about this amazing project that Ed was working on, and now it’s done. Get ready. It’s a textbook—a science textbook about the stars. “Say what?” you might be thinking. Well, trust me. This book is cool! Ed has been teaming with the Space Telescope
Writing my previous post about digital banks got me thinking about the widespread use of analytics. In his book Digital Bank, Chris Skinner states that data should be seen as the most critical asset for digital banks. Actually, this holds true for almost every company nowadays. If you don’t have data of
With the growing popularity and availability of online reviews and ratings, consumers have more information than ever before when purchasing a hotel stay. In order to build effective pricing and positioning strategies, hotel managers need to understand how consumers are using all of this user generated content with price to
Chess in the classroom? Teachers and parents have discovered the educational benefits, and the trend is growing rapidly. And they are in good company. On June 13th, 2014, Bono called his time as a scholastic chess player as his "... greatest childhood pleasure. In Ballymun we had a chess club,
Because you are already halfway there and you should want the entire process to be data-driven, not just the historical reporting and analysis. You are making decisions and using data to support those decisions, but you are leaving value on the table if the analytics don't carry through to forecasting. In the
What is true customer loyalty? And how can you achieve it without compromising data privacy? According to Peter Hedberg, a senior customer relationship manager with SAS, true customer loyalty programs put the customer at the center of the relationship and use data in ways that are designed to please - not panic
