Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Measuring the Business Impacts of Effective Data — University of Texas at Austin study

Posted by analytics on September 15, 2010  |   No Comments »

Sybase, recently acquired by SAP in May of 2010, just released in conjunction with the University of Texas a study on the use of data in 150 Fortune 1000 firms. Ecrmguide.com has quite a nice review of the report.

A couple of intriguing quotes from this report.-

“The significance of this research is that to the best of our knowledge it is the first study that has quantified the relationship between improvements in data and key performance metrics of businesses today. Most studies focusing on the benefits of data quality report the percentage of firms that have seen a specific type of benefit after investing in data improvement1. They tell us neither the magnitude of the effect on performance nor what it takes to improve the attributes of data.
While large-scale investments in Information Technology have certainly helped improve basic data access and quality, our findings suggest that there is still room for major performance gains through additional investments in better data.”

Payoffs of effective data strategy:

  • Productivity of employees
  • Return on Equity (ROI)
  • Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)
  • Return on Assets (ROA)

We can’t agree more. A must read.

Download the pdf here.

Data Driven Detroit

Posted by analytics on September 7, 2010  |   No Comments »

Detroit AnalyticsData Driven Detroit is an organization which shows the power of analytics at the community level. Its director, Kurt Metzger, seems to be a staunch advocate of sharing as much data as possible to harness a true “enterprise” look at what is going on. As Detroit goes under its post industrial transformation the details from the data prove to be interesting.

From the website-

In 2008, The Skillman Foundation and The Kresge Foundation awarded City Connect Detroit a $ 1.85 M planning and implementation grant to incubate Data Driven Detroit (originally named the Detroit-Area Community Information System). The charge for the newly-formed agency was to become a nonprofit, independent data center that would promote positive community change by:

  1. Tracking neighborhood-level social, economic and environmental indicators for the local initiatives of key foundations;
  2. Creating greater community access to and utilization of community data and information; and
  3. Building a community data warehouse of comprehensive, reliable, relevant information relating to social, economic and environmental indicators.

Using Analytics to Achieve High Performance – Harvard Business Review

Posted by analytics on August 4, 2010  |   No Comments »

Earlier this summer our partner Accenture had an article in the The Harvard Business Review about the importance of Analytics for businesses that want to have a competitive advantage. This article, in conjunction with Tom Davenport’s new book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results which is referenced in the article, is showing the growing interest and popularity of analytics in the workplace. The Davenport book is a must read for any business executive in today’s world. If not, your competition will, and have the ability to make precise and razor sharp decisions to compete .

How business analytics help drive competitive advantage

Originally published in The Harvard Business Review, June 2010

Download the full article: Using Analytics to Achieve High Performance [PDF, 664KB]

Companies are operating in a sea of their own data. Many are just treading water, but some companies are swimming toward new forms of competitive advantage by using business analytics. Click to read entire article.

Four Analytics Roadblocks

Posted by analytics on July 20, 2010  |   No Comments »

Is your company ready for Analytics? This is one of the first questions we ask a potential client. We have found organizational silos and credibility are among the major barriers for us to be engaged with a customer. Often there is a lengthy education needed in addition to all the reports, books, and chatter in the WSJ about the importance of analytics.

The following analytics roadblocks were sited in the white paper Capitalizing on Customer Analytics from 1to1 Media, a division of Peppers and Rogers Group.

Four Analytics Roadblocks

  1. Organizational Silos: Silos of conflicting responsibilities, and lack of accountability as a result
  2. Credibility: The ability to gain credibility for analytics’ return on investment (ROI) measurements, especially for the softer benefits
  3. Data Quality: Data cleanliness and accuracy, including the ability to integrate customer data from multiple silos
  4. The Right Data: Having and leveraging the right data for high-value activities like understanding potential wallet size or determining future value

ADAPA Predictive Analytics Scoring Engine

Posted by analytics on July 8, 2010  |   No Comments »

Zementis’ ADAPA Scoring Engine is one of the best examples that demonstrates the power and revolutionary nature of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS). The ADAPA Scoring Engine allows us to compute massive amounts of data like never before. What once took days now takes minutes.

From the youtube video – ADAPA® enables you to succeed with Predictive Analytics. It is a stand alone scoring engine that reads PMML descriptions of models and scores huge streams of data. ADAPA® is the first standards-based real-time scoring engine for Predictive Analytics Models, and, its available, now, as a fully hosted Software-as-a Service (SaaS) solution on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. For more information, visit us at www.zementis.com.

Value of Analytics Beyond the Day to Day

Posted by analytics on July 2, 2010  |   No Comments »

One of the most common places we hear about analytics is in the area of Google Analytics and the tracking of website page views and click-through rates. As a first foray into the world of Analytics, Google offers an extremely robust system to track the data on your website. It’s free and relatively easy to navigate your way around. However, like all things Analytics, there is tremendous power in what one does with the data, how it is analyzed and how it is used to predict.

Search Engine Land is a tremendous blog and site for all things about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). In this article Christoper Wallace raises the question and challenge to what you can do with the Analytics you are pulling off your website. There is more to just seeing the improvement and growth of your website, or lack thereof. Business leaders can use this information to identify and segment their users and customers but even assist in coming up with Business Units that can help in endeavors like rebranding and marketing.

IBM buys Coremetrics to boost analytics

Posted by analytics on June 22, 2010  |   No Comments »

From DMNews, IBM has purchased Coremestrics to assist its customer particularly in Web analytics. Of particular interest in this article is the following quote:

IBM noted that companies are looking for ways to optimize marketing processes and get better insights into client demands when it announced the acquisition. The Armonk, NY-based company noted that its studies have shown more than eight in 10 CEOs want to get closer to customers and understand them better.

Analytical Data Prep 101

Posted by analytics on June 18, 2010  |   No Comments »

Ergenomics partner SAS has a wealth of educational information on their website about the methodology and practice of collecting and analyzing data. In this webinar:

  • Philip Russom, Senior Manager of TDWI Research, The Data Warehousing Institute
  • Scott Chastain, Americas Technology Practice, SAS
  • Anne H. Milley, Senior Director, Technology Product Marketing, SAS

discuss the beginning processes of setting up an environment to conduct predictive analytics. Beyond the distinction of a data warehouse, a data mart querying items in the data warehouse, and an analytic database being able to assist in creating predictive analytics from these sources, this webinar is a must view for managers and buyers beginning on the journey of predictive analytics.

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