Fern Halper's data makes the world go 'round
the big wide world of data and analytics
As a female and a feminist who has worked in male-dominated fields for most of my career, what immediately caught my eye when reading the most recent TDWI Salary Survey report was the on-going pay disparity between women and men in BI. According to TDWI research, men continue to out-earn women in the BI field,… Continue reading Does Gender Matter in BI Salaries?
There has been a lot of discussion recently around advanced analytics. I'd like to throw my definition into the rink. I spent many years at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s and 1990s deploying what I would call advanced analytics. This included utilizing statistical and mathematical models to understand customer behavior, predict retention, or analyze… Continue reading What is advanced analytics?
The other day I was looking at the analytics discussion board that I moderate on the Information Management site. I had posted a topic entitled “the value of advanced analytics.” I noticed that the number of views on this topic was at least 3 times as many as on other topics that had been posted… Continue reading Five requirements for Advanced Analytics
I had an interesting chat with Roman Stanek, CEO of Good Data last week about the debate over data security and reliability in the cloud. For those of you who are not familiar with Good Data, it provides a collaborative business analytics platform as a SaaS offering. The upshot of the discussion was something like… Continue reading Analyzing Data in the Cloud
I’m a big fan of data visualization because it really helps people understand information. You can certainly derive a lot of insight from a report, but sometimes it helps to look at data in a different way. Dashboards are one way to get information to people in an easily digestible format. However, in order for… Continue reading Data visualization and the dynamic dashboard
I recently had an interesting conversation about business intelligence and operational BI with Steve Mauss, President and COO of Knowledge Relay. Knowledge Relay was founded in 1984 and has its roots in project management software for the aerospace/defense and government verticals. Over the years, it has expanded its reach to support other industries such as… Continue reading Practical Operational BI
Sales are a critical component of what makes a company tick and metrics that measure sales performance are used by many organizations. Some companies track sales by category and examine pipeline metrics, sales metrics and win loss ratios. However, while companies may have metrics in place, this doesn’t mean that they are tracking the right… Continue reading Sales metrics that matter
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Michael DeNitto and Mark Budreski from MarketSight about enhancements to the MarketSight platform and future plans. MarketSight is a web-based survey analysis tool. I use it as part of my own toolkit at Hurwitz & Associates. While I am a fairly sophisticated data analyst, what is nice… Continue reading MarketSight 7.0 – Survey Analysis Made Simple
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… Continue reading Decisions and Consequences
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.… Continue reading Seven guiding principles for analyzing data
Fern Halper's data makes the world go 'round 