Business Intelligence

  • How mature is your advanced analytics program?

    Advanced analytics is being deployed in a range of use cases across business units and industries, especially as data types and volume increase. One of the top use cases for advanced analytics we see at TDWI is predictive analytics to understand customer or operational behavior. Statistical as well as machine learning models are used to

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  • 3 Best Practices for Becoming More Self-Sufficient with Self-Service Analytics

    My colleague Dave Stodder and I recently lead a Webinar in conjunction with our best practices report about becoming a data-driven organization.  Audience questions included several about self-service. In particular, attendees were interested in how to make self-service more accessible to managers and leaders in their organization. Let me set the stage for self-service analytics

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  • Three Organizational Best Practices for Becoming Data-Driven

    Dave Stodder and I just finished writing our 4Q Best Practices Report on “What it Takes to Be Data-Driven: Technologies and Practices for Becoming a Smarter Organization.”  What struck me in analyzing the data for the report is that although organizations have embraced BI and analytics, they still have a journey in front of them

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  • What does it take to achieve analytics maturity?  Earlier this week, Dave Stodder and I hosted a webcast with a panel of vendor experts from Cloudera, Microstrategy, and Tableau.  These three companies are all sponsors of the Analytics Maturity Model; an analytics assessment tool that measures where your organization stands relative to its peers in

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  • Next-Generation Analytics: Four Findings from TDWI’s Latest Best Practices Report

    I recently completed TDWI’s latest Best Practices Report: Next Generation Analytics and Platforms for Business Success. Although the phrase “next-generation analytics and platforms” can evoke images of machine learning, big data, Hadoop, and the Internet of things (IoT), most organizations are somewhere in between the technology vision and today’s reality of BI and dashboards. For

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  • I am in the process of gathering survey data for the TDWI Predictive Analytics Best Practices Report.  Right now, I’m in the data analysis phase.  It turns out (not surprisingly) that one of the biggest barriers to adoption of predictive analytics is understanding how the technology works.  Education is definitely needed as more advanced forms

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  • Next in my discussion of big data providers is IBM.   Big data plays right into IBM’s portfolio of solutions in the information management space.  It also dove tails very nicely with the company’s Smarter Planet strategy.  Smarter Planet holds the vision of the world as a more interconnected, instrumented, and intelligent place.  IBM’s Smarter Cities

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • For more years than I like to admit, I have been focused on the importance of managing data so that it helps companies anticipate changes and therefore be prepared to take proactive action. Therefore, as I watched the market for predictive analytics really emerge I thought it was important to provide customers with a holistic

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