A few days ago, I wrote a post on the "soul" of analytics - basically the careful balance we need to keep between qualitative and quantitative decision-making. I asked others to post their experiences and perspective, and I was fortunate enough to begin a "dia-blog" with Colonel Jim Markley, Director
In our SAS Hartford regional office, there is an annual tradition – the holiday breakfast. This will be my first breakfast with my office mates and I’m looking forward to the famous conference room waffles cooked up by a certain insurance account executive. Thinking about those waffles reminded me of
In a number of posts over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing ideas for becoming an analytically driven insurance company. We’ve talked about information strategies, user enablement, collaboration, and now we’re going to talk about growing pains. We recently met with an insurer for a discussion around their
This year, SAS joined the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud (CAIF). Not long ago I had a chance to attend my first CAIF meeting and I was very impressed with what I saw and heard. Fraud continues to be a thorn in the side of the insurance industry. The most recent
As I mentioned in an earlier post, having an information strategy and analytic goals tied to key business objectives are critical components of being able to competitively leverage your analytic assets and capabilities. In general, in the insurance industry vertical I support, we don’t see many organizations that have a
Last week, several of the faculty members of the International Institute for Analytics (IIA) —Tom Davenport, Jeanne Harris, James Taylor, John Elder, Bill Franks, Niel Nickolaisen, Jeremy Shapiro and I—offered some predictions for analytics in the coming year. You can hear an audio recording of the discussion or read a
If you're like most large organizations, you've got a bunch of business intelligence and analytic applications at your fingertips. In my prior organization, a large insurance company, I believe the magic number of tools that the organization had to support was north of 40. No kidding. Now, this is a
A professional acquaintance and an expert in statistics once told me that if you don't understand how to perform the process of analytics through programming - the creation of the data flow, the transformation of the variables and the development of the statistical procedure - then you had no business
Analytics is the hot new buzzword at the TeleManagement Forum (TMForum). Because I am the Communications Industry Marketing Manager for SAS, you would expect me to return from last week’s TMForum Management World conference with tales about the importance of analytics in the telecommunications industry. But I'm not the only
Last month I attended the Predictive Analytics World conference in Washington DC. It attracted more attendees from last year with broad representation from multiple industries. The conference was kicked off by Eric Siegel’s keynote focusing on Five ways predictive analytics cuts enterprise risk. The gist of his presentation was to
