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...]

Relying on Data Can Lead to the Wrong Decisions Says CFO.com

I just read a new CFO Magazine article called “That New Big Data Magic”, which contains the following opening paragraphs: Back in the 1980s, American Airlines (AA) was partnered with British Airways (BA), and AA’s marketing head wanted to know how many of the airline’s gold card members, its most profitable customers, were flying BA rather than AA. Larry Tieman, then a managing director in IT at AA, dove into the massive amounts of data AA... [Read More...]

Carbon Footprint Analysis Leads to Concrete Savings: Walkers Crisps

I’ll confess upfront that I’ve always been slightly dubious about the assertion that “sustainability is about making money”. After all, if it’s about making money, it’s something that companies should be doing anyway – it’s only when there’s a tradeoff between sustainability and money that there’s room for interesting debate about to what extent it should be one of the goals of the organization. However, as Diversey’s CEO Curt... [Read More...]

Flawed Decision Process and the Deadly Sproutbreak

Why did it take so long to discover the source of the deadly outbreak of E.coli poisoning in Germany? Since the start of the outbreak, 35 people have died, over 100 will need kidney transplants or life-long dialysis, more than 3,000 people are ill, and falsely-accused Spanish cucumber producers have lost millions of Euros. Researchers initially relied on the most obvious source of data: the tests carried out on suspect food. Unfortunately, the thousands... [Read More...]

Where Idiots Get Their Data: Other Idiots (Don’t Let it Happen in Your Company)

The video below is an entertaining look at where global warming myths come from, by science journalist Peter Hadfield. At the risk of spoiling the video, the short answer is “idiots who don’t understand numbers”. Here’s an example from the video, where somebody claims in a blog post that global temperatures have been dropping, using this straight-line “analysis”: As the video makes clear, to work out what’s really happening to the... [Read More...]

2010 Football World Cup Business Intelligence

There are only three matches left in this year’s World Cup, and the competition is wide open after a series of upsets have knocked out some of the big international players, including the winners of the last three world cup tournaments: Italy, France, and Brazil. To enhance your enjoyment of the game – or simply to see a real-life example of what you can do with business intelligence technology, check out the suite of tools offered as part of... [Read More...]

How to Easily Analyze Your Excel Data in the Cloud

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is the first analysis tool that I’ve seen that I can honestly say is intuitive enough to use without any training (see http://microfinance.sap.com to prove it to yourself). If you’d like to know more about the product, list of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about SAP BusinessObjects Explorer” in a previous post. This post is about the http://explorer.ondemand.com web site that lets you easily upload any... [Read More...]