Fashion + Analytics + Social = The Perfect Ensemble
I’ll be presenting at Decoded Fashion next week at the Lincoln Center in New York: “The first Fashion and Technology Forum Series connecting the world’s best startups and most noteworthy technologies to the Fashion, Beauty and Retail industries to accelerate innovation and increase the bottom line.” It promises to be fascinating, with a wide range of sessions on different aspects of using technology in the fashion business, including... [Read More...]
Concrete Examples of How Health Intelligence Saves Lives
An excellent article in Health Data Management by Greg Gillespie gives some wonderful examples of the power of analytics to improve health outcomes, looking at data from some of the 2,000+ clinical trials that Cleveland Clinic is currently running. I strongly encourage you to read the original article (also available in pdf format), but here are summaries of the three use cases highlighted: hand-washing analytics, central-line analytics, and blood-transfusion... [Read More...]
SAP Innovation Tour in the Baltics
I’m in the Baltics this week (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia), presenting a business innovation keynote and a big data track session as part of the SAP Innovation Forum. Yesterday’s sessions in Tallinn were fascinating, including: Industry thought leader Peep Aavikso, on why smart companies need smart people Janeck Gustavson of Eesti Energy talking about their use of SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) A very passionate talk from Olga... [Read More...]
Business Intelligence Best Practice Twitter #SAPChat
I will be the host of the next #SAPChat, an interactive panel discussion carried out entirely over Twitter. It’s scheduled for 9am PST / 18:00 CET on Wednesday February 29th, and the subject will be “Business Intelligence Best Practice”. We will be discussing how best to implement business intelligence projects successfully, with an emphasis on people-focused hints and tips rather than technical discussions. And with only 140 characters available,... [Read More...]
2012: The Year Analytics Means Business
The real trend this year is not the technology. It’s about helping business people make better decisions, and actually change the way companies do business. Analytics has always been about transforming business, but the recent huge changes in analytic technology have created interesting new opportunities for business innovation. Most organizations are now starting to understand the technical opportunities, but many struggle to apply those new opportunities... [Read More...]
What I Found Interesting About Gartner BI Summit 2012 London
As always, it was a huge pleasure to catch up with customers, colleagues, analysts, partners, and competitors at one of Europe’s largest BI conferences. It was a great show overall, and I came away even more optimistic about analytics for the coming year. Here are Jason Rose and I having an off-the-cuff discussion of what we found interesting about the latest Gartner BI Summit 2012 in London this week: And here are some longer thoughts about the... [Read More...]
Are You in Denial About Governance, Risk, and Compliance?
In a previous post, I talked about the “illusory superiority” effect, and how it blinds people to the fact that, on average, it’s unlikely that they use data better than their competitors. Guess what? It turns out that it applies to governance, risk, and compliance, too. Here are some figures from another Economist Intelligence Unit Survey, “Ascending the Maturity Curve, Effective Management of Enterprise Risk and Compliance”: We can see... [Read More...]
Survey: Everybody Uses Data Better Than Their Competitors?
Here’s a chart from a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit called “Big data: Harnessing a game-changing asset”, showing that only 9% of respondents believe that they use data worse than their competitors. Let’s face it, they’re probably in denial. It’s often called “Illusory Superiority” or the “Lake Wobegon Effect” (a radio show where “all the children are above average”), and it’s a real force in the analytics... [Read More...]
Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and the Rest of Us
This post is part of a “blogorama” organized by smartdatacollective.com– see “The Emerging Role of the Analyst” for links to other bloggers’ views of this theme. Recently, I’ve been feeling like I’ve stepped through a looking glass to another similar-but-very-different world. I’m steeped in 20+ years in corporate data warehousing and business intelligence practice. Throughout that time, there have been big... [Read More...]
Business People Are Dumb On Average(s)
Here’s one real-life example of the limits in quantitative thinking observed in an average company, shared with me by Michael Thompson. He recently worked with Dan Rosenberg’s UX team on a SAP research project that isolated over 100 distinct, real-life uses of business analytics across dozens of roles and business functions. A retail analyst was attempting to figure out the success of product promotions on the “sales” page of a web site.... [Read More...]
I was the eighth employee of 
