The Inaugural Hurwitz & Associates Predictive Analytics Victory Index is complete!

For more years than I like to admit, I have been focused on the importance of managing data so that it helps companies anticipate changes and therefore be prepared to take proactive action. Therefore, as I watched the market for predictive analytics really emerge I thought it was important to provide customers with a holistic [...]

Five Analytics Predictions for 2011

In 2011 analytics will take center stage as a key trend because companies are at a tipping point with the volume of data they have and their urgent need to do something about it. So, with 2010 now past and 2011 to look forward to, I wanted to take the opportunity to submit my predictions [...]

What is advanced analytics?

There has been a lot of discussion recently around advanced analytics. I’d like to throw my definition into the rink. I spent many years at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s and 1990s deploying what I would call advanced analytics. This included utilizing statistical and mathematical models to understand customer behavior, predict retention, or analyze [...]

Advanced Analytics and the skills needed to make it happen: Takeaways from IBM IOD

Advanced Analytics was a big topic at the IBM IOD conference last week. As part of this, predictive analytics was again an important piece of the story along with other advanced analytics capabilities IBM has developed or is in the process of developing to support optimization. These include Big Insights (for big data), analyzing data [...]

Analyzing Big Data

The term “Big Data” has gained popularity over the past 12-24 months as a) amounts of data available to companies continually increase and b) technologies have emerged to more effectively manage this data. Of course, large volumes of data have been around for a long time. For example, I worked in the telecommunications industry for [...]

Five requirements for Advanced Analytics

The other day I was looking at the analytics discussion board that I moderate on the Information Management site. I had posted a topic entitled “the value of advanced analytics.” I noticed that the number of views on this topic was at least 3 times as many as on other topics that had been posted [...]

What about Analytics in Social Media monitoring?

I was speaking to a client the other day.  This company was very excited about tracking its brand using one of the many listening posts out on the market.  As I sat listening to him, I couldn’t help but think that a) it was nice that his company could get its feet wet in social [...]

Metrics Matter

I had a very interesting conversation last week with Dyke Hensen, SVP of Product Strategy for PivotLink.  For those of you not familiar with PivotLink, the company is a SaaS BI provider that has been in business for about 10 years (before the term SaaS became popular). Historically, the company has worked with small to [...]

Social Network Analysis: What is it and why should we care?

When most people think of social networks they think of Facebook and Twitter, but social network analysis has its roots in psychology, sociology, anthropology and math (see Scott, John Social Network Analysis for more details). The phrase has a number of different definitions, depending on the discipline you’re interested in, but for the purposes of [...]

The Importance of multi-language support in advanced search and text analytics

I had an interesting briefing with the Basis Technology team the other week.  They updated me on the latest release of their technology called Rosette 7.   In case you’re not familiar with Basis Technology it is the multilingual engine that is embedded in some of the biggest Internet search engines out there – including Google, [...]