More excerpts from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. The book is mostly in the “voices” of a hundred+ innovators. In addition, for the chapter on analytics, I “recruited” 3 authorities to guide the discussion.
“Howard Dresner coined the term “Business Intelligence” (BI) in 1989. Then, for over a decade, he was an influential Gartner analyst on the BI market sector. He left to become chief strategy officer for Hyperion (now part of Oracle) and now runs his own advisory firm. He recently authored Profiles in Performance. David Axson cofounded The Hackett Group, which many a Fortune 500 company has used as a gold standard for business process benchmarks. He then did a stint as head of corporate planning at Bank of America and now runs an advisory firm, The Sonax Group, specializing in strategy and performance management. He is author of The Management Mythbuster. Nenshad Bardoliwalla spent a decade with analytic technologies at large software companies, such as Siebel, Hyperion, and SAP, and has a wide perspective on what enterprises expect from their analytical tools and teams. He is currently in “stealth mode” in a start-up and is coauthor of Driven to Perform.”
The chapter is organized around 9 themes – with quotes from each of the 3 above and other interviews and mini-case studies in each.
- The Black Swan Is Not That Rare
- It’s the Age of “Big Data”
- Deemphasize Slice and Dice, Reemphasize Decisions
- We Still Have Plenty of Small Data
- Don’t Ignore Unstructured Data
- And Then There Is Web and Social Data
- This Much Data Equals Better Visualization Tools
- This Much Data Equals Massive Storage Requirements
- This Much Data Equals Predictive Powers
Some quotes from the chapter:
“Paul Kedrosky is explaining how most enterprises approach analytics: “Why does the drunk look for lost keys under the lamppost even though the keys were dropped far away? Because that’s where the light is. They are looking for confirmation when they should be looking for falsification, as the philosopher, Karl Popper would argue.” “
“He’s been where no man had ever been before. To IV65536. Chad LaCrosse is not talking about Trekkies and obscure planets. He is talking about a colleague who ran out of cells in his Excel spreadsheet. Until the 2007 version of the Microsoft spreadsheet increased the dimensions, the bottom-right cell of the spreadsheet defined the boundary.”
“Beyond search entrepreneur. That’s how Ramana Rao describes himself. “Because of the roaring success of Google, people have until recently focused too much on the magic in responding to the query in and not enough to the result out as a canvas for ongoing dialog.” Before launching his current venture, iCurrent, which is focused on
personalized news delivery, Rao spent his career at Xerox PARC”
“So why was Enrique Salem, the chief executive of Symantec, which sells storage, telling customers to stop buying storage? At a conference, he told the audience to focus instead on “storage resource management, thin provisioning, data deduplication and intelligent archiving.”
“Best Buy, the electronics retailer, is one example. The company has made an art form out of customer segmentation. It talks in terms of “Buzz” customers—young gadget enthusiasts—and “Jill” stores aimed at suburban moms. But beyond this high-level segmentation, Best Buy has 15-plus terabytes of data on over 75 million customers: products they have bought; neighborhoods they live in from shipping addresses and rebate checks; often credit and employment histories. Its sophisticated analytics has allowed it to identify that a sliver—just 7 percent of its customers—drive 43 percent of the company’s overall sales volume.”
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