Five Trends in Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics, a technology that has been around for decades has gotten a lot of attention over the past few years, and for good reason.  Companies understand that looking in the rear-view mirror is not enough to remain competitive in the current economy.  Today, adoption of predictive analytics is increasing for a number of reasons including a better understanding of the value of the technology, the availability of compute power, and the expanding toolset to make it happen. In fact, in a recent TDWI survey at our Chicago World Conference earlier this month, more than 50% of the respondents said that they planned to use predictive analytics in their organization over the next three years. The techniques for predictive analytics are being used on both traditional data sets as well as on big data.

Here are five trends that I’m seeing in predictive analytics:

• Ease of use.  Whereas in the past, statisticians used some sort of scripting language to build a predictive model, vendors are now making their software easier to use.  This includes hiding the complexity of the model building process and the data preparation process via the user interface.  This is not an entirely new trend but it is worth mentioning because it opens up predictive analytics to a wider audience such as marketing.  For example, vendors such as Pitney Bowes, Pegasystems, and KXEN provide solutions targeted to marketing professionals with ease of use as a primary feature.  The caveat here, of course, is that marketers still need the skills and judgment to make sure the software is used properly.
• For more trends: http://tdwi.org/blogs/fern-halper/list/ferns-blog.aspx

Closing the loop in customer experience management: When it doesn’t work

Last week I had the unfortunate experience of trying to deal with American Airlines regarding some travel arrangements via its Advantage help desk.  I literally spent hours on the phone trying to get to the right person.  I won’t bore you with the details of my experience, however I did want to talk about how American used social media analytics in an active way – and where it came up short.

By now, many people are aware that companies are not only using social media analytics to understand what is being said about their brand; they are using it to actively engage with a customer when there is a problem as well.  This typically involves some sort of automatic classification of the problem, automatic routing to the right person, and suggested responses to the customer.

The good news was that when I tweeted about American Airlines I actually got a response back from them.  Here’s my first tweet and response:

So far, not bad.  Here’s the next round of tweet/response:

Well, this was not what I wanted to hear, since it only partially addressed my issue.  If I just wanted an apology, I would not have bothered to tweet about a credit.  I would have preferred a follow up email (if they had a way to link my information together) or at least the contact information where I could get more help.  American Airlines wasn’t helping me they were whining.

So then I tweeted the following:

I gave up after this response. Frankly, it almost sounded sarcastic.  Should I have said, “Not on twitter, send me an email contact?”  I’m sending a letter to Craig Kreeger, instead, explaining my dissastisfaction. Maybe I’ll send it snail mail……….

My point is that if you’re going to engage your customers online via the channel that they used in the first place, make it count.  This exchange simply annoyed me.  Maybe twitter wasn’t the best channel for customer service, but it is the one that I used since no one was answering the phone and the American site couldn’t let me perform the function I wanted to do.  I’m not saying its’ easy to engage adequately via twitter.  To do this properly would have involved more finely tuned text analytics to understand what I was actually talking about as well as a way to integrate all of my data together to understand me as a customer (i.e. my loyalty information, recent trips, etc).  Maybe the customer service reps were tired after last month’s outage debacle at American when thousands of passengers were

Two Big Data Resources Worth Exploring

It’s a good day.  Our new book, Big Data for Dummies, is being released today and I’m busy working on a Big Data Analytics maturity model at TDWI with Krish Krishnan.  Krish, a faculty member at TDWI, is actually presenting some of the model at the TDWI World Conference:  Big Data Tipping Point taking place during the first week of May (see sidebar).  I would encourage people to attend, even if you aren’t that far along in your big data deployments.  TDWI has terrific courses in all aspects of information management and we understand that most companies will need to leverage their existing infrastructure to support big data initiatives.  In fact the title of this World conference is, “Preparing for the Practical Realities of Big Data.”   Check it out.

Back to the book.  Here’s a look at the Introduction!  Enjoy!

 

Two Weeks and Counting to Big Data for Dummies

I am excited to announce I’m a co-author of Big Data for Dummies which will be released in mid-April 2013.  Here’s the synopsis from Wiley:

Find the right big data solution for your business or organization

Big data management is one of the major challenges facing business, industry, and not-for-profit organizations. Data sets such as customer transactions for a mega-retailer, weather patterns monitored by meteorologists, or social network activity can quickly outpace the capacity of traditional data management tools. If you need to develop or manage big data solutions, you’ll appreciate how these four experts define, explain, and guide you through this new and often confusing concept. You’ll learn what it is, why it matters, and how to choose and implement solutions that work.

• Effectively managing big data is an issue of growing importance to businesses, not-for-profit organizations, government, and IT professionals
• Authors are experts in information management, big data, and a variety of solutions
• Explains big data in detail and discusses how to select and implement a solution, security concerns to consider, data storage and presentation issues, analytics, and much more
• Provides essential information in a no-nonsense, easy-to-understand style that is empowering

 

Big Data For Dummies cuts through the confusion and helps you take charge of big data solutions for your organization.

Five Challenges for Text Analytics

While text analytics is considered a “must have” technology by the majority of companies that use it, challenges abound.  So I’ve learned from the many companies I’ve talked to as I prepare Hurwitz & Associates’ Victory Index for Text Analytics,a tool that assesses not just the technical capability of the technology but its ability to provide tangible value to the business (look for the results of the Victory Index in about a month). Here are the top five: http://bit.ly/Tuk8DB.  Interestingly, most of them have nothing to do with the technology itself.

Five reasons to use text analytics

I just started writing a blog for AllAnalytics, focusing on advanced analytics.  My first posting outlines five use cases for text analytics.  These include voice of the customer, fraud, warranty analysis, lead generation, and customer service routing.  Check it out. 

Of course there are many more use cases for text analytics.  On the horizontal solutions front these include enhancing search, survey analysis and eDiscovery.  The list is huge on the vertical side including medical analysis, other scientific research, government intelligence,  and the list goes on.

If you want to learn more about text analytics, please join me for my webinar on Best Practices for Text Analytics this Thursday, April 29th,  at 2pm ET.  You can register here

Four Vendor Views on Big Data and Big Data Analytics Part 2- SAS

Next up in my discussion on big data providers is SAS.  What’s interesting about SAS is that, in many ways, big data analytics is really just an evolution for the company.  One of the company’s goals has always been to support complex analytical problem solving.  It is well respected by its customers for its ability to analyze data at scale.  It is also well regarded for its ETL capabilities.  SAS has had parallel processing capabilities for quite some time.  Recently, the company has been pushing analytics into databases and appliances.  So, in many ways big data is an extension of what SAS has been doing for quite a while.

At SAS, big data goes hand in hand with big data analytics.  The company is focused on analyzing big data to make decisions.  SAS defines big data as follows, “When volume, velocity and variety of data exceeds an organization’s storage or compute capacity for accurate and timely decision-making.”   However, SAS also includes another attribute when discussing big data which is relevance in terms of analysis.  In other words, big data analytics is not simply about analyzing large volumes of disparate data types in real time.  It is also about helping companies to analyze relevant data.

SAS can support several different big data analytics scenarios.  It can deal with complete datasets.   It can also deal with situations where it is not technically feasible to utilize an entire big data set or where the entire set is not relevant to the analysis.  In fact, SAS supports what it terms a “stream it, store it, score it” paradigm to deal with big data relevance.   It likens this to an email spam filter that determines what emails are relevant for a person.  Only appropriate emails go to the person to be read.  Likewise, only relevant data for a particular kind of analysis might be analyzed using SAS statistical and data mining technologies.

The specific solutions that support the “stream it, store it, score it” model include:

• Data reduction of very large data volumes using stream processing.  This occurs at the data preparation stage.  SAS Information Management capabilities are leveraged to interface with various data sources that can be streamed into the platform and filtered based on analytical models built from what it terms “organizational knowledge” using products like SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Text Miner and SAS Social Network Analytics. SAS Information Management (SAS DI Studio, DI Server, which includes DataFlux capabilities) provides the high speed filtering and data enrichment (with additional meta-data that is used to build more indices that makes the downstream analytics process more efficient).  In other words, it utilizes analytics and data management to prioritize, categorize, and normalize data while it is determining relevance.  This means that massive amounts of data does not have to be stored in an appliance or data warehouse.

• SAS High Performance Computing (HPC). SAS HPC includes a combination of grid, in-memory and in-database technologies. It is appliance ready software built on specifically configured hardware from SAS database partners.  In addition to the technology, SAS provides pre-packaged solutions that are using the in-memory architecture approach.
• SAS Business Analytics.  SAS offerings include a combination of reporting, BI, and other advanced analytics functionality (including text analytics, forecasting, operations research, model management and deployment) using some of the same tools (SAS Enterprise Miner, etc) as listed above.  SAS also includes support for mobile devices.

Of course, this same set of products can be used to handle a complete data set.

Additionally, SAS supports a Hadoop implementation to enable its customers to push data into Hadoop and be able to manage it.  SAS analytics software can be used to run against Hadoop for analysis.  The company is working to utilize SAS within Hadoop so that data does not have to be brought out to SAS software.

SAS has utilized its software to help clients solve big data problems in a number of areas including:

• Retail:  Analyzing data in real time at check-out to determine store coupons at big box stores; Markdown optimization at point of sale; Assortment planning
• Finance: Scoring transactional data in real time for credit card fraud prevention and detection; Risk modeling: e.g. moving from looking at loan risk modeling as one single model to  running multiple models against a complete data set that is segmented.
• Customer Intelligence: using social media information and social network analysis

For example, one large U.S. insurance company is scoring over 600,000 records per second on a multi node parallel set of processors.

What is a differentiator about the SAS approach is that since the company has been growing its big data capabilities through time, all of the technologies are delivered or supported based on a common framework or platform.  While newer vendors may try to down play SAS by saying that its technology has been around for thirty years, why is that a bad thing?  This has given the company time to grow its analytics arsenal and to put together a cohesive solution that is architected so that the piece parts can work together.  Some of the newer big data analytics vendors don’t have nearly the analytics capability of SAS.   Experience matters.  Enough said for now.

Next Up:  IBM

SAP moves to social media analysis with NetBase partnership

Today, SAP and NetBase announced that SAP will resell NetBase solutions as the SAP® Social Media Analytics application by NetBase.

What does this mean?  According to the announcement:

“SAP Social Media Analytics is a cloud-based solution that is able to process more than 95 million social media posts per day. It uses an advanced natural language processing (NLP) engine to read and categorize each one of these posts according to the opinions, emotions and behaviors that the market is expressing. “

NetBase is a SaaS social media insight and analytics platform that contains one year of social media data.  This data consists of blogs, tweets, newsfeeds, and other Web content.  NetBase combines deep Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytics with a content aggregation service and a reporting capability.  The product provides analysis around likes/dislikes, emotions, reasons why, and behaviors. For example, whereas some social media services might interpret the sentence, “Listerine kills germs because it hurts” as either a negative or neutral statement, the NetBase technology uses a semantic data model to understand not only that this is a positive statement, but also the reason it is positive.

The platform is currently used by hundreds of corporate customers, and was developed in partnership with five of the top 10 consumer packaged goods companies, including Coca-Cola and Kraft.  I have used NetBase for competitive intelligence, most notably when I was putting together the Victory Index for Predictive Analytics.  The platform is quite robust and easy to use.

 The idea is that an end-user could do his or her social media analysis in the NetBase solution and then, using an API provided with the solution, export data into Business Objects to further analyze it.  Here are a few screen shots I pulled from the company’s online demo that illustrate this:

Step 1:  In this simple example, say an end-user is trying to understand the buzz around a specific product (in this case a PC product).  He or she utilizes the NetBase system to understand some of the key opinions, passions, and sentiment regarding this brand.

Step 2:  Once the end user has done some analysis, he or she can export the results of the analysis to SAP Business Objects.  The illustration below shows the kind of data that is exported.  In this case, there is information about attributes and emotions about the product.  These values also have a sentiment indicator associated with them.

 

This data can then be visually displayed and analyzed in SAP Business Objects.   In the example below, the insights are displayed on an IPad.

In addition to simply displaying information in SAP Business Objects, the plan moving forward is to be able to operationalize this data throughout workflows that are part of an enterprise business process.  I imagine that SAP HANA will enter the picture too at some point.

I am glad to see that SAP is partnering with NetBase on this solution.  It is a good time for SAP to incorporate social media analysis into its products.  As social media analysis becomes more mainstream, SAP customers are, no doubt, asking for a solution that can work with SAP products.  While SAP bought Inxight, a text analytics vendor, a number of years ago, it does not have the social media historical data or the SaaS business around it.  This partnership seems like a good solution in the short term.  I will be interested to learn more about how SAP will incorporate social media analysis into enterprise workflows.   Certainly NetBase will benefit from the huge SAP installed base.  I suspect that SAP customers will be intrigued by this new partnership.

Four Vendor Views on Big Data and Big Data Analytics Part 1: Attensity

I am often asked whether it is the vendors or the end users who are driving the Big Data market. I usually reply that both are. There are early adopters of any technology that push the vendors to evolve their own products and services. The vendors then show other companies what can be done with this new and improved technology.

Big Data and Big Data Analytics are hot topics right now. Different vendors of course, come at it from their own point of view. Here’s a look at how four vendors (Attensity, IBM, SAS, and SAP) are positioning around this space, some of their product offerings, and use cases for Big Data Analytics.

In Attensity’s world Big Data is all about high volume customer conversations. Attensity text analytics solutions can be used to analyze both internal and external data sources to better understand the customer experience. For example, it can analyze sources such as call center notes, emails, survey verbatim and other documents to understand customer behavior. With its recent acquisition of Biz360 the company can combine social media from 75 million sources and analyze this content to understand the customer experience. Since industry estimates put the structured/unstructured data ratio at 20%/80%, this kind of data needs to be addressed. While vendors with Big Data appliances have talked about integrating and analyzing unstructured data as part of the Big Data equation, most of what has been done to date has dealt primarily with structured data. This is changing, but it is good to see a text analytics vendor address this issue head on.

Attensity already has a partnership with Teradata so it can marry information extracted from its unstructured data (from internal conversations) together with structured data stored in the Teradata Warehouse. Recently, Attensity extended this partnership to Aster data, which was acquired by Teradata. Aster Data provides a platform for Big Data Analytics. The Aster MapReduce Platform is a massively parallel software solution that embeds MapReduce analytic processing with data stores for big data analytics on what the company terms “multistructured data sources and types.” Attensity can now be embedded as a runtime SQL in the Aster Data library to enable the real time analysis of social media streams. Aster Data will also act as long term archival and analytics platform for the Attensity real-time Command Center platform for social media feeds and iterative exploratory analytics. By mid 2012 the plan is for complete integration to the Attensity Analyze application.

Attensity describes several use cases for the real time analysis of social streams:

1. Voice of the Customer Command Center: the ability to semantically annotate real-time social data streams and combine that with multi-channel customer conversation data in a Command Center view that gives companies a real-time view of what customers are saying about their company, products and brands.
2. Hotspotting: the ability to analyze customer conversations to identify emerging trends. Unlike common keyword based approaches, Hotspot reports identify issues that a company might not already know about, as they emerge, by measuring the “significance” of change in probability for a data value between a historical period and the current period. Attensity then assigns a “temperature” value to mark the degree of difference between the two probabilities. Hot means significantly trending upward in the current period vs. historical. Cold means significantly trending downward in the current period vs. historical.
3. Customer service: the ability to analyze conversations to identify top complaints and issues and prioritize incoming calls, emails or social requests accordingly.

Next Up:SAS

Informatica announces 9.1 and puts stake in the ground around big data

Earlier this week, Informatica announced the release of the Informatica 9.1 Platform for Big Data. The company joins other data centric vendors such as EMC and IBM by putting its stake in the ground around the hot topic of Big Data. Informatica defines Big Data as, “all data, including both transaction and interaction data, in sets whose size or complexity exceeds the ability of commonly used technologies to capture, manage and process at a reasonable cost and timeframe. Indeed, Informatica ‘s stance is that Big Data is the confluence of the three technology trends including big transaction data, big interaction data and big data processing.” In Informatica parlance the transactional data includes OLTP, OLAP, and data warehouse data; the interaction data might include social media data, call center records, click stream data, and even scientific data like that associated with genomics. Informatica targets native, high performance connectivity and future integration with Hadoop, the Big Data processing platform.

In 9.1 Informatica is providing an updated set of capabilities around self-service, authoritative and trustworthy data (MDM and data quality), data services and data integration. I wanted to focus on the data services here because of the connection to Big Data. Informatica is providing a platform that companies can use to integrate transactional data (at petabyte scale and beyond in volume) and social network data from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Additionally, 9.1 provides the capability to move all data into and out of Hadoop in batch or real time using universal connectivity to including mainframe, databases, and applications which can help in managing unstructured data.

So, how will companies utilize this latest release? I recently had the opportunity to speak with Rob Myers, an Informatica customer, who is the manager of BI architecture and data warehousing, MDM, enterprise integration for HealthNow. HealthNow is a BlueCross/BlueShield provider for parts of western New York and the Albany area. The company is expanding geographically and is also providing value added services such as patient portals. It views its mission not simply as a claims processor but as a service provider to healthcare providers and patients. According to Rob, the company is looking to offer other value added services to doctors and patients as part of its competitive strategy. These offerings may include real time claims processing, identifying fraudulent claims, or analytics for healthier outcomes. For example, HealthNow might provide a service where it identifies patients with diabetes and provide proactive services to them to help manage the disease. Or, it might provide physicians with suggestions of tests they might consider for certain patients, given their medical records.

Currently, the company utilizes Informatica PowerCenter and Informatica Data Services for data integration including ETL and data abstraction. HealthNow has one large data warehouse and is currently building out a second. It is exposing data out to a logical model in data services tier. For example, its member portal utilizes data services to enable members to sign in and in real time, integrate 30-40 attributes around each member including demographic information, products, and eligibility for certain services into the portal. In addition, the company’s actuaries, marketing groups, and health services group have been utilizing its data warehouses to perform their own analysis. Rob doesn’t consider the data in these warehouses to be Big Data. Rather they are just sets of relational data. He views Big Data as some of the other data that the company currently has a hard time mining, for example data on social networks and the unstructured data in claims and medical notes. The company is in the beginning phase of determining how to gather and parse through this text and expose it in a way that it can be analyzed. For example, the company is interested in utilizing the data that they already have together with unstructured data and providing predictive analytics to its community. HealthNow is exploring Hadoop data stores as part of this plan and is excited about the direction that Informatica is moving. It views Informatica as the middleware that can get the trusted data out of the various silos and integrated in a way that it can then be analyzed or used in other value-added services.

It is certainly interesting to see what end-users have in mind for Big Data and, for that matter, how they define Big Data. Rob clearly views Big Data as high volume and disparate in nature (i.e. including structured and unstructured data). There seems to be a time dimension to it. He also made the point that its not just about having Big Data, it’s about doing something that he couldn’t do before with it – like processing and analyzing it. This is an important point that vendors and end-users are starting to pick up on. If Big Data were simply about volume of different kinds of data, then it would be a moving target. Really, an important aspect of Big Data is about is being able to perform activities on the data that weren’t possible before. I am glad to companies thinking about their use cases for Big Data and vendors such as Informatica putting a stake in the ground around the subject.