Time (sub required) on the quants and data crunchers who drove the Obama re-election campaign from their secretive Chicago "cave"
“The magic tricks that opened wallets were then repurposed to turn out votes. The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone — a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.
It was this database that helped steady campaign aides in October’s choppy waters, assuring them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September blunders. “We were much calmer than others,” said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every imaginable scenario. “We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”


Internet of Things + Big Data + Future of Work = Massive Payback
I witnessed an awesome panel today at the GE Minds+Machines event in San Francisco. Moderated by Chris Anderson of Wired, executives from 4 industries described the opportunities (and some of the challenges) that come from advanced analytics and smarter workforces.
Deborah Butler, CIO of Norfolk Southern, described the promise of more optimized, automated dispatching, the fuel efficiencies from smarter locomotives and the preventative maintenance from track side sensors which monitor for problem wheels (as with Union Pacific I wrote about here)
Michael Niggli, president and COO of San Diego Gas and Electric described with smart meters and other innovations they now have 900 x more data on consumer usage compared to 3 years ago.This is allowing them to “gamify” reductions in kilowatts of power consumption. He described “smart transformers” which will allow for more optimal scheduling of nighttime charging of electric vehicles across the customer base. He talked about the payback from growing renewable fuels (up to 21% now)
Gary Beck, VP Flight Operations of Alaska Airlines, described their success with Required Navigation Performance (see my post here), the efforts with the Green Skies over Seattle project and the opportunity to spread similar efficiency/lower emissions across the country. He talked about how the massive data that aircraft already create – performance, Gs related to turbulence etc could be shared across the air grid rather than being summarized today via air traffic controllers.
Wayne Keathley, President of Mount Sinai Hospital, talked about being at the verge of massive breakthroughs in medicine with advances in genomics and pathogenesis and with an extremely skilled workforce. However, the economics of the industry are under severe pressure, and the hospital model needs to move from individual patient focus to population awareness with plenty of services being delivered outside the traditional hospital walls. He also talked about hotspots with massive data availability
Here’s the kicker. GE believes that just 1% improvements in each of these industries can generate massive payback as the slide below shows. I could have listened to the 5 go on all day long.
BTW Chris did a superb job moderating this wide panel of executives, and I complimented him afterwards. In turn, he signed a copy of his new book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution :)
I will post a video of the session when available.
November 29, 2012 in Analytics, Health Care, Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)