Scrooge Didn’t Believe in Sentiment Analysis Either
I mentioned Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens’ fictional financier from A Christmas Carol, in a previous post on the importance of using new leading (rather than lagging) sources of data to improve company performance. Famously cold-hearted, tight-fisted and greedy, it’s a fair bet Scrooge didn’t care much about sentiment analysis. But social media analytics – mining social networks for publicly-available data about what people... [Read More...]
The Future of Business: Faster Than Real-Time?
Presenting at LeWeb London, Analyst Jeremiah Owyang of Altimer explained that the conference theme (“Faster Than Real Time”) referred to the importance of anticipating customer needs, not just reacting to them as fast as possible. He used the retailer Target as an example: the company uses predictive technology to give special offers for products that customers are likely to want in the future, and in one infamous case knew that a teenage girl... [Read More...]
Are You Ready For SAP’s Big Data Processing Framework?
Steve Lucas, EVP of Database and Technology, unveiled SAP’s Big Data Processing Framework at the keynote session of SAP Insider BI2012 in Orlando earlier this year. I was honored to have the opportunity to be on stage with Steve for the first time, and we were ably assisted by Fred Samson. In the recorded session below, we discuss what “big data” means, why you should care, and how SAP is making it easy to Ingest, Store, Process, and Present... [Read More...]
Innovation by SAP Nordic Forums
I’ve had the huge pleasure of presenting at a series of Innovation by SAP events across the Nordic region. Please find below my two presentations from the sessions in Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Stockholm (note: only incremental changes from the presentations in the Baltic region in a previous post) The keynote presentation: Business In The Moment: From Reactive to Proactive 2012 will be a year of business transformation. New technologies such... [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...]
BI and The Limitations of Human Cognition in Den Bosch
I presented at my first conference of the year last week, the Heliview Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing 2012 conference in ‘s Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. The first keynote, by Erasmus scholar Dr. Roeland Dietvorst, was about “Performance Management in the Brain”, and a subject close to my heart: the (severe) limitations we evolved apes have when trying to make rational decisions. He illustrated his point with examples of great research... [Read More...]
Building Competitive Advantage (SAP World Tour Keynote)
Here’s a recording of a World Tour keynote presentation (it happens to be from Belgrade, Serbia, but I did similar presentations in several different regions). It covers how companies can build competitive advantage through customer intimacy, product leadership, category renewal, and operational excellence, using examples from SAP’s customers. You can download the slides in either PowerPoint or pdf format. Share and Enjoy ... [Read More...]
Big Leap Forward: Analytics Keynote at UK & Ireland SAP User Group Conference 2011
I was honored to speak at this years UK & Ireland SAP User Group Conference held in Birmingham, UK. The first main day saw great keynotes from the new SAP UK Managing Director, Steve Winter; Analyst Ray Wang; SAP’s CIO, Oliver Bussmann; and Olympic Sprinter Steve Cram. You can read a full review by Christoph Ziedler on SAP.info, and see the various videos on YouTube starting with the introduction by Alan Bowling, Chairman of UKISUG. I gave... [Read More...]
Business Analytics in Russia
It was the 2011 Business Analytics Forum in Moscow, Russia last week. Dmitry Lisogor, director of business solutions for SAP CIS kicked things off and introduced the sponsors, including long-term BusinessObjects partner Tern Group Alys Woodward of IDC gave a talk on Pervasive BI, with an excellent presentation on “Making your Business Analytics Pervasive” IDC ran a pervasive BI study in 2008 questioning 1141 organizations worldwide, and then... [Read More...]
Why The Last Decade of BI Best-Practice Architecture is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete
Business analytics, or solving business problems through better use of data, is absolutely nothing new. But every decade or so new technology takes a big leap forward (client/server, web, etc.) and makes previous architectures obsolete. The next big wave of business analytics infrastructure is poised to start arriving this year. Let’s take a look at an analogy from the history of computing. The first ever computer used for commercial business applications... [Read More...]
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