The last time I mentioned Accenture on this blog, I linked to their recent survey results, which show that companies are recognizing the value of predictive analytics – and are planning for it. What does that mean for business analytics vendors? In a lot of ways, it means business leaders
The National Association of State CIOs has just released an issue brief that has me very excited. “DO YOU THINK? OR DO YOU KNOW? Improving State Government Operations Through Business Analytics” gives an overview of business analytics and includes examples of effective implementations. The brief’s title paraphrases the quote “Do
Day one of the 2010 CFO Corporate Performance Management Conference in New York is in the books, and while the day’s presentations and discussions should rightly merit being the prime subjects of this post, those events have been overshadowed by one of even greater magnitude: dinner with Thornton May. Where
~ Contributed by I-kong Fu ~ AnalyticsCamp is an unconference started by Nathan Gilliatt after a group of us met at a networking meeting in Raleigh last year called Web Analytics Wednesday. The first AnalyticsCamp will take place at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill on Saturday, February 6th,
“The ability to predict future business trends with reasonable accuracy will be one of the crucial competitive advantages of this new decade," SAS CEO Jim Goodnight told students, faculty and business partners at a Jan. 15 Villanova University School of Business event. “And you won’t be able to do that
Yesterday at The Premier Business Leadership Series, I had the tremendous pleasure of attending the panel debate Balancing Intuition and Analytics in Decision Making. The panelists were: Malcolm Gladwell - Best-selling author of Outliers: The Story of Success, Blink and The Tipping Point; Tom Davenport - Best-selling author of Competing
Decision management expert James Taylor wins the prize for most prolific blogger from The Series. James gives us thorough summaries of great presentations on: Balancing Intuition and Analytics in Decision Making. Analytics & Innovation, Analytics in the Executive Suite. SAS Media Day customer panels on fraud detection. and optimization. By
Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and Blink, and Tom Davenport, Babson College professor and author of Competing on Analytics, engaged this morning in a debate on a live Webcast onsite at The Premier Business Leadership Series at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. The theme of the debate is analytics vs. instinct:
Like any good SAS employee, I monitor the social Web for conversations about analytics. Not that I’m an analytics geek – far from it. As a lifelong writer and marcomms veteran, the quants view me as about as comprehensible (and as substantial) as navel lint. It’s for precisely that reason
Big news in our industry this morning: IBM plans to buy analytics software vendor SPSS for $1.2 billion. In one sense, I'm sad to see SPSS disappearing into the large IBM stack. Besides SAS, SPSS was one of the last independent analytic software companies. A colleague says, “It’s the end
Almost every other article or blog or survey I read nowadays discusses virtualization and cloud computing topics. Why? Partly because IT operations and infrastructure professionals are facing difficulty monitoring and managing computing resources in a distributed environment. They have to ensure that capacity is always available to be assigned as
At last week's SAS Global Forum, I sat down for a few minutes with Stephan Chase, Vice President of Customer Knowledge at Marriott Hotels. Chase's team provides the analytics and predictive modeling to the marketing team within the Marriott Rewards business unit. I asked him to elaborate on an earlier
I’ll admit I am particularly fond of a saying, “Begin at the beginning.” All too often we get ahead of ourselves when trying to tackle a problem. And without a clear understanding of the full scope of a problem, there’s always the risk of making it worse. Something like this
It's great to see so many in attendance for the first-ever Predictive Analytics World. I've heard a lot of interesting talks already (too bad some are in parallel making choices hard). A recap and highlights of the talks I was able to hear and the conversations I had during breakouts
Do you remember the article, "This is your life ... with SAS" from the second quarter 2008 issue of sascom magazine? If you do, you'll remember how much information we were able to pack into two pages with the fun comic-strip format. If you don't remember it or never saw
This morning, as I was writing this blog post at the kitchen table, my 5-year old daughter ran into the room from watching “Sesame Street.” She excitedly announced, “Mommy, the letter of the day is R!” Too true. The recent NY Times story on the R programming language, which included
On the twelfth day of Christmas, analytics gave to me… Twelfth graders passing, Eleven pipes for piping, Ten cards for keeping, Nine nurses nursing, Eight beers for tilting, Seven Days of Swimming, Six bets parlaying, FIIIIIIVE Lion Kings, Four fraud alerts, Three linchpins, Two perfect gloves, AND A TIGER WITH
Saw an interesting Tweet (a post on Twitter) from investor and writer Paul Kedrosky today: "geeks only: five best data visualization projects of the year http://is.gd/cwIk" The link takes you to the FlowingData blog (created by a PhD statistics student in NY), and a post on some amazing examples of
Doug Henschen, Intelligent Enterprise Editor-in-Chief, in a recent blog post, provides his usual insightful analysis of the market as he cuts through the dizzying spin of IBM exec Ambuj Goyal. The general manager of IBM’s information management division questions the value of business analytics in an interview with Intelligent Enterprise.
In the long-running television sitcom “Seinfeld,” Jerry’s neighbor (and nemesis) Newman often commented on his job as a U.S. postal worker. Making fun of the mail; and post office; was a recurring theme. In the show’s final season, one episode was even titled “The Junk Mail I was reminded of
Tired of all the depressing news about the economy? Me too. That’s why it was oh so refreshing to hear some good news this past week. I got a firsthand look into how SAS is helping companies weather -- and in some cases, thrive – in our current "challenging" economy.
I’ve read - and heard - that SAS spoils its employees. I’ve been at SAS for six months, and it’s true. A great example is the training. Earlier this week, I was invited to attend a SAS® Hands-On Workshop. The workshop is actually designed for customers, but open to everyone.
As I have been at SAS for a while now, well 10 years, I started to reflect on my time with SAS. I went from being a data mining systems engineer (SE), to an analytical strategist, to now being the Global Industry Marketing Manager for Education. I started in the
(Sometimes the ROI is never having to say you're sorry.) 5000 BC: Grog uses two sticks and four rocks to graph the upward trend in sales of his new invention, the wheel. 3200 BC: Sumerian analysts predict the world's use of letters will be greater than Mesopotamia's supply of clay
These days, “silo” has become a dirty word within organizations – full of negative connotations about curmudgeonly individuals or teams not playing well with others. But at the How to Compete on Analytics: Apply It event in San Francisco on June 4th, SAS speaker Bob Messier advised the audience to
~ Contributed by Hope Squires ~ Daniel Schorr is one of my favorite NPR reporters. I just hope he doesn’t mind me announcing that in a blog. Schorr has some strong opinions about what blogging has done to the news industry. In a recent Q&A with The Sacramento Bee, he
Joining SAS in North Carolina as a marketer from New York City has been a real eye opener. Language like OLAP, DI, ERM, DPPM and various other business intelligence buzzwords have been thrown my way in a vernacular I am not completely used to. The cuisine and culture are a
Rhesus monkeys can figure out basic probabilities, according to this study. Now I suppose that given enough monkeys and time, they might even replace your forecasting department. But I wouldn't worry. They haven't even managed to come up with the works of Shakespeare yet.
In the UK there is debate forming about how best to target benefits on the most deserving cases without building a dependency culture. For some time the UK Government has been using 'means tests' to ascertain whether a claimant needs State support, or whether they have independent resources that they
Research from a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says yes, according to the New York Times (registration required). Judging by comments on the article, many Times readers disagree. In 2005, when the NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) award raised similar questions, three Southeastern economists turned
