Is your data complete and accurate, but useless to your business?

Ensuring that complete and accurate data is being used to make critical daily business decisions is perhaps the primary reason why data quality is so vitally important to the success of your organization.  However, this effort can sometimes... [read more]

The Evolution from Business Intelligence to Personal Intelligence

There are a lot more companies out there offering ‘intelligence’ services not just to other companies, but now even to individuals. I’m using the definition of ‘intelligence’ as in Business Intelligence (BI) somewhat broadly now, but it is an area of interest to me, and an area that seems to be growing in opportunity. There are new... [read more]

Nine Really Simple Segmentation Strategies

Segmentation can be as important as any other component of message development. While most segmentation requires some preference data there are others that can be leveraged if you’re just starting out or have limited information/ time:1 - The Random A:B Split – Just divide the list, alter something and fire… see which message performs... [read more]

A Record Named Duplicate

Although The Rolling Forecasts recently got the band back together for the Data Rock Star World Tour, the tour scheduling (as well as its funding and corporate sponsorship) has encountered some unexpected delays.  For now, please enjoy the following lyrics from another one of our greatest hits—this one reflects our country music... [read more]

Decisions, decision management and analytics

Tom Davenport was interview recently by the Sloan Business Review on Reengineering your decision making processes about analytics and how companies make decisions. While the interview is mostly focused on manual decision making, many of the points are just as valid when you consider decision management and decisioning technology as I do... [read more]

Food+Tech Connect: Promoting a Networked Food System

food+tech connect | promoting a networked food system Created by shiftN, this map visualizes the global interconnections among food, agriculture, water, energy, soil, and humans that comprise our food system. What fascinates me about this map is how I discovered it and how that process demonstrates an opportunity for information... [read more]

BI and the Increasing Use of Social Networking

The role of social media within BI is becoming more prominent.  Not only is information on the Internet being used to drive analytics, but the way in which BI is being presented is slowly shifting towards ease of use, collaboration, and self-service models.  Each of these aspects enable organizations to take advantage of social... [read more]

Solving the MDM Problem is Not Easy.

Master Data Management is inherently challenging. Technology alone will not solve the problem – most of the root causes issues are process and competency-oriented: Organisations typically have complex data quality issues with master data, especially with customer and address data from legacy systems There is often a high... [read more]

DQ-View: Is Data Quality the Sun?

Data Quality (DQ) View is an OCDQ regular segment.  Each DQ-View is a brief video discussion of a data quality key concept. This recent tweet by Dylan Jones of Data Quality Pro succinctly expresses a vitally important truth about the data quality profession. Although few would debate the necessary requirement of skill, some might... [read more]

Prototyping Cloud Analytic Applications

Cloud computing is changing the way that companies build and deploy their analytic solutions. With cloud computing, computing is available on demand, scales elastically, and can be self-provisioned. This flexibility sometimes requires developing new analytic infrastructure and new analytic algorithms, which, in turn, requires some... [read more]

Worst Practices in Data Mining

I recently read the article Worst practices in business forecasting written by Michael Gilliland and Udo Sglavo. It is published in the July/August issue of AnalyticsMagazine, which is by the way an excellent journal about analytics. In their article, the authors are looking for the reasons why forecasts are sometimes completely wrong.... [read more]

Ask.com Tries Different Question-Answering

One of the common (and mistaken) assumptions about IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson, is that it has a database of answers to Jeopardy clues, and that it's just a matter of finding the right one. For Jeopardy, which has a staff of writers coming up with puzzlers, such a database would be impossible. Consider this clue from... [read more]

David Warren (1925-2010) – Do Companies Need his “Black Box”?

David Warren, the inventor of the prototype of the airplane flight recorder “black box”, passed away in July, 2010. An Australian, he was inspired by the death of his father from a plane crash. His device accomplished his objective: to simultaneously record the conversations of pilots and instrument readings. Do companies need a “black... [read more]