At Predictive Analytics World San Francisco this week I attended back to back sessions on econometrics, a word that doesn’t surface as often as I think it should. Bestselling books like Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything or Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our
Happy New Year! Wishing everyone a prosperous and joyful 2012! The joyful festive atmosphere continues to pervade most Chinese families in Asia in the coming week, as we will be celebrating Lunar New Year (Spring Festival) on Jan 23rd . This date is determined by the lunisolar Chinese calendar. Alongside
Hear directly from an organization that is firing on all cylinders with analytics and achieving true data-driven insight in all its business areas. On Dec. 14, SAS customer Kelley Blue Book (KBB) and SAS Alliance partner Modern Analytics will share firsthand learnings during a live webinar, "Analytics – An Inside Perspective,”
I have previously dealt independently with issues of forecasting, planning, and budgeting in separate posts, and the time has now come to pull them all together in one place and just come out and say what I really mean. This integrative post was prompted by a recent invitation I received
If you are feeling out of sorts, a bit down and out, and want to take it all the way to full-blown depression, have I got a book recommendation for you: “Normal Accidents”, by Charles Perrow (1984). Perrow’s premise is that we have designed certain systems, nuclear reactors being his primary
Here is a four-stage approach to financial forecasting. I urge you to seriously consider adopting at least level 1, then next look at how layering on the other stages might transform your approach to business planning. The four stages are: (1) Multiple Forecast Inputs, (2) Marco Polo, (3) Driver-based forecasting,
How do you know when you’ve given a great presentation? When someone remembers it a year later and writes a blog post about it. That great presentation in this case was given by Erik DaRosa, Director of Global FP&A for Avon, who spoke at the IE Group’s Financial Forecasting Conference this time last year
I was under the impression that Black Swans were supposed to be rare. Rare enough to be effectively non-computable by standard methods. Nassim Taleb’s formulation of the Black Swan Theory is comprised of the three traits of: outlier (rarity), extreme impact, and retrospective predictability (i.e. 20/20 hindsight). I write this
How important is accurate telecom forecasting? Sitting through another presentation this week on the explosive growth of mobile data, and the eye-popping statistics about how many Facebook and Twitter users there are, I can’t help but be excited by the possibilities. But I also have this feeling of déjà vu
With the exception of the occasional James Bond movie that proves the rule, we don’t as a matter of course combine our modes of transportation into one all-purpose vehicle. But when it comes to financial management, there is one tool , commonly called the Budget, that gets applied to all
