Analytic Lessons Learned From the Big Game

Proof that analytics is in every part of our lives, even american football. There are a few take aways from the sport that can be applied to analytics.

1. Get the Jump 
2. Win on the Edge
3. Improve Upon What’s Already Working
4. Change Your Culture
5. Don’t Dismiss Intuition

I contribute regularly to CMSWire here is a link to the article "The Denver Broncos Analytic Game"

Its all about the Quants

The term Quants has gained a lot of traction over the past couple years. Tom Davenport's book “Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics” brought the term to the mainstream and introduced us to a new breed of business expert that is driving innovation and insights with data. Quants are teaming with the business to create new opportunities to compete while driving revenue and optimizing the workflows. These math minded experts have become the rock stars of the data world and a new tool for success within progressive data centric companies. In this week’s #ThinkChat segment Tom and I discuss what quants are and where they fit in your organization, the critical role of math, statistics and how quants are working with the business.

I often blog as the Chief Research Officer for Dell Software - Read this entire post on Dell.com

Want analytics with your fries?

At the risk of aging myself, I’ve probably attended 70 or so TDWI conferences and executive summits, but the recent TDWI Las Vegas was different. It marked the organization’s 20th anniversary and reinforced the importance of analytics, which was a big topic among attendees, speakers and vendors...

I often blog as the Chief Research Officer for Dell Software - Read this entire post on Dell.com

Process Driven Analytics For Manufacturing

Innovative companies are adopting advanced analytics to take action and match the speed of their business. This is especially true in the world of manufacturing where complicated process driven activities benefit greatly from smarter, faster analytic insights and actions. Collecting and analyzing process data from sophisticated manufacturing processes requires a flexible and agile infrastructure that supports a wide variety of disparate data sources often spanning sensor and machine sources that are combined with instrumentation and testing data, machinery and production data, customer and market data, supply chain information, 3rd party benchmarks and a wide assortment of system data. 

I often blog as the Chief Research Officer for Dell Software - Read this entire post on Dell.com

Portability in a Hybrid Data Ecosystem

Adoption of the Hybrid Data Ecosystem continues to grow. Vendors are working to deliver highly integrated ecosystems with platforms that provide the user an agile and flexible array of solutions to address today's complex and demanding workloads. The interesting part of the story is the division in how they approach this opportunity. Some vendors are building fully featured "Walled Garden" style solutions with all parts dependent upon one another. Its a nice strategy that may lead to better inetegration but you can't really get away from it once you are engaged. This type of lock-in to technology and infrastruture can be dangerous and in the long run very expensive for the consumer.

Others (only a few) are focusing on highly integrated environments that match the competition feature for feature but at the same time allow for portability. Pivotal is a company working to bring its clients portability with cloud infrastructure. A common fear of cloud adaptors is being locked into one infrastructure provider for the duration of their projects or forever. If you utilize Pivotal on its Cloud Foundry platform you have the ability to move from AWS to Rackspace if need be providing a level of flexibility that most companies would prefer over time. This strategy is also smart for companies that suspect a Cloud based program may migrate back behind the firewall at some point. Being locked-in to a Cloud provider will make this an impossible change or at the least terribly expensive.

So this begs the question, what's better? Walled gardens or portable infrastructure. The answer seems obvious to me but I'm interested to hear from you on this topic.