Dateline: October 4, 2012 – Facebook reaches one billion users! One billion people connected on a single platform; one-seventh of the world’s population. If you assume 40,000 BCE as the start of modern humans, it took the planet 41,804 years to reach a population level of one billion; it took
It goes without saying that if you know the value of analytics, it can sometimes be frustrating when leaders who may not have an analytic background do not understand or see the difference between basic reporting and advanced analytics. At SAS, we often refer to those two very different things
… and any fool will mind it”. ~ Henry David Thoreau. The EPA was in my neighborhood several weeks ago testing well water - never a good sign. It was determined that the subdivision just north and upstream of us had once been the site of a farm contaminated by
In case you are wondering, yes, I am reusing the same graphic from last week, but this time to make a contrasting point. Last time, in “The Skeptical CFO” I was focused on the VARIABILITY in the data and the forecast. This week, however, we’re headed in the opposite direction,
During a recent presentation on performance management I had an audience member ask me if perhaps I had minored in cynicism along with my degree in finance. I replied that, with the science, psychology and philosophy I’d taken, I probably had minored in skepticism, but that the cynicism came later,
Did you ever experience a time where you hear or see the same thing over and over again? Whether you chalk it up to coincidence, immersion or saturation, you clearly start seeing the same ideas or topics discussed in multiple places. Lately, I have been hearing about the topic of
Like Vince said a few days ago, you don’t have to be Goliath to see how the intersection of big data and high performance analytics creates competitive advantage. Let’s also be realistic though: compared to someone like Walmart, pretty much everyone’s David! While Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank may not be the largest companies by global measures, they’re still
In my last blog post I revealed the WOW factor of SAS Visual Analytics. In summary: analyzing billions of rows of data, across vast numbers of columns, via 100+ correlation calculations in SECONDS (wow). What exactly does that mean? SAS Visual Analytics takes full advantage of SAS’ high-performance analytics technology.
When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus. But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than
That there is a growing shortage of analytical talent in most of the economies of the world is clear. In a May 2011 report, the McKinsey Global Institute put some numbers on the demand: “By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with
