Business Intelligence

Statistician's profile

As someone who trained as a statistician, I've always struggled with that title. I love the rigor and insight that Statistics brings to data analysis, but let's face it: Statistics — the name — has always had a bit of a branding problem. That's why I'm a fan of the term "data scientist."[read more]

Tactical analytics: stay on the right path

From social media sentiment analysis to dynamic product pricing, we’re adopting more and more super-fast micro-decision systems to do what’s good “right now, right there” without much consideration for the cumulative effect over a longer period and a broader scope.[read more]

A tale of two BIs

All modern Information Technologies which are capable of improving the enterprise competitiveness fall in the scope of BI, such as ERP, CRM, Reporting tools, Data Computing, Statistical Analysis, Data Mining, OLAP, and ETL, etc. They can be divided into two categories: Desktop BI and Solution BI.[read more]

business skillset / shutterstock

Employees with technical skills are critical to enable an analytics program, but the ability to communicate, relate and navigate throughout an organization—so called “softer skills”—are especially needed to propagate analysis and communicate the impact of data-driven decision-making.[read more]

BI roadblocks?

People have been writing about the limitations of self-service BI for years. What does the failure of self-service BI mean for Big Data? Big problems. Unless self-service and pervasive BI become the norm, enterprises will never productively tap the business ROI from Big Data.[read more]

Cloud computing / shutterstock

At its most basic, cloud computing is about the ability to enhance enterprise value through more efficient use of IT resources. One of the more innovative ways to boost capacity and add capabilities in a cloud environment is by the virtualization of services and infrastructure.[read more]

Marketing automation

Leading marketing and advertising agencies are discovering that marketing automation is giving them the power to outflank their competition. Here are the steps you can take to automate your marketing, improving your customer service and your profits in the process.[read more]

Future of video streaming

Fact #1: the video streaming category is getting crowded. And, fact #2, it’s getting more than a little competitive, as media companies are moving into streaming video looking for their own new revenue streams. What does this mean for consumers?[read more]

Mobile & Decision Management: James Taylor

While at IBM IMPACT this year I was interviewed about Decision Management, Mobile and more. Check out this video to see the interview.[read more]

Customer data / shutterstock

Focusing on customer retention and reducing churn instead of customer acquisition, Gainsight integrates with Salesforce and uses sales data, surveys, support tickets, usage logs and other sources of customer intelligence to turn customer retention into an automated, data-driven process.[read more]

What's your data story? 

My colleagues and I had the opportunity to represent Attivio at the recent Tableau 8 Roadshow as a partner vendor. Unlike some BI events I have experienced over a number of years, the Tableau 8 Roadshow attendees were very much user-based rather than IT-focused.[read more]

Big Data journey / shutterstock

While much around big data remains hype, many companies are in the fledging stages of drawing value from their big data corpus, and given an army of discussions and opinions around the topic, it’s still hard to find a clear roadmap to arrive at the Big Promise.[read more]

BI evolution

Operational analytics is making headlines in 2013. But why is it important? And why is it more likely to succeed now than in the mid-2000s, when it was called operational BI, or the mid-1990s when it surfaced as the operational data store (ODS)? Let's see what has changed.[read more]

decision management / shutterstock

I have written about few in-memory technologies and approaches in recent months, and into this space has come Teradata with its new Intelligent Memory. I would summarize the idea behind the Teradata Intelligent Memory product with three points.[read more]

big data privacy / shutterstock

One of the most discussed concerns surrounding big data today is privacy. While many powerful analytics are possible with the detailed data that is now collected on each of us, the sensitive nature of much of that data requires rethinking data practices and applications.[read more]