Business Intelligence
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I recently had an interesting conversation about classification and search with James Zubok, CFO of Brainware, Inc. Brainware is a Virginia based company that was once part of SER Systems AG, a former German ECM company. Brainware provides products that help companies extract information from unstructured and semi-structured documents, such as invoices, order forms, contracts,…
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I’ve been writing a lot about text analytics because I think it is a critical technology for deriving insight from unstructured data. Late last summer, Hurwitz & Associates published a report on Text Analytics. As part of our research, we surveyed companies that had deployed this technology, were planning to deploy the technology, or had…
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Not everything is easy. I analyzed data for decision-making for many years using advanced techniques such as predictive modeling, machine learning and even influence diagrams. With the rush to pervasive BI we often forget about the need for truly sophisticated analysis to aid in complex decision making. I’m talking about decision support for critical strategic…
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I was talking to an old friend the other day who is involved in using the results of research to help grow a business. He told me some interesting stories that made me revisit some basic tenets of good analysis. Yes, you may think that some of these are obvious, but they still bear repeating.…
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Robin Bloor and I were briefed by SAS about some of its visualization technologies last week as part of the research we’re undertaking in innovations in BI. SAS has thought a lot about visualization. In fact, the company has an interesting user centric UI model that actually looks at classes of users across various visualization…
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I was thinking about Master Data Management (MDM) last night. There’s been a lot of hype over the past few years about MDM. At its simplest level, MDM is about handling common data, such as customer or product data, in a way that enables disparate IT systems and business groups to reuse the data. The…
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A wise man once told me, “Look at the data. What are the data telling you?” That was my dissertation advisor, some twenty years ago, before the term data visualization was even coined. And that’s the sensible advice I’ve followed throughout my career when analyzing all different kinds of data. Data visualization in the form…
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When most people think “analytical application” they think “classic BI” or “predictive modeling.” That’s no longer accurate. The very nature of analytical applications is changing. Text analytics brings unstructured information into the equation. Visualization changes the way that we look at data and information. The reality is that companies are starting to build applications that…
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Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge, told me about Clarabridge’s recently announced partnership with CallMiner. It is a marriage of text analytics with speech analytics, and hence it should attract the attention of the big call center users. In fact, it should interest every business that makes extensive use of telephony. Working together, these technologies provide…
Fern Halper's data makes the world go 'round 