SmartData Collective - The world's best thinkers on business intelligence & data analytics

Keep Your Data Scientist…Send Me A Data Artist!

BillFranks — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:11:54 +0000

My point here is that you don’t really want someone who only has technical skills. You need something more regardless of what you are calling the analytic professional you are hiring. You need someone who can paint a compelling picture with data. You need a data artist.

Measuring Conversion Rate: Are you making an Impact?

Tricia Aanderud — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:57:29 +0000

Conversion Rate is key to ensuring that your website is performing. Learn how to calculate and consider the best way to present it on your dashboard.

Is Life Sciences the New Frontier for Analytics?

Brett Stupakevich — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:07:09 +0000

Researchers say pharmaceutical and other life sciences companies are ramping up their uses of

Would Beethoven Have Given a Rat’s Ass about Business Analytics?

SethGrimes — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:02:49 +0000

I offer observations and a bit of analytics history in response to Gary’s question, “Could the great classical music composer Ludwig Beethoven successfully implement business analytics in an organization?,” followed by my answer. Oh, in case you’re wondering: Business analytics is a collection of techniques and tools that model and extract insight from data, applied for business purposes.

Super Bowl 12: It’s All Over But For Measuring the Impact of The Shouting

Jennifer Roberts — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:12:15 +0000

Just to recap, the CNBC/CI Super Sunday Ad Tracker monitored conversations from across the publicly available social media landscape. That means we captured conversations from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Message Boards, etc. We then ranked each brand based on our Engaged Consumers value.

The Real Social Media Influencers

TomAnderson — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:05:20 +0000

I’m thinking of folks who are really influential about social marketing (on par with) Scott Monty of Ford or Guy Kawasaki. So I don’t leave anyone very important out, if there is anyone who you know/follow who is Über influential please let me know.

An Analysis of A NASA Dbase Hack-and-Dump

BryanHalfpap — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:02:39 +0000

Recently, some news of a NASA hack-and-dump passed my twitter deck. I decided after watching a few of my friends re-tweet the news that it might be worth checking out. At least I’d see if I could perform some password analysis on any dumped credentials, or even test out the new Crucialpoint Cloudera Hadoop password cracker on any leftover hashes.

What I Found Interesting About Gartner BI Summit 2012 London

TimoElliott — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:51:08 +0000

Gartner has bowed down to the market trend and dropped the unwieldy category name “Business Intelligence and Performance Management” in favor of the simpler umbrella term “Business Analytics”, following in the footsteps of other analysts (e.g. IDC) and vendors (SAS, SAP, etc.).

Upcoming Webinar: The Cutting Edge of Big Data Monetization

CliffFigallo — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:48:25 +0000

Our moderator and CEO Robin Carey will ask our two guest experts if there is, indeed an identifiable cutting edge in finding revenue in today's proliferating, exploding and diversifying databases.

Could Beethoven Have Implemented Business Analytics?

GaryCokins — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:58:26 +0000

Could the great classical music composer Ludwig Beethoven successfully implement business analytics in an organization? I was educated as an industrial engineer, and I do not view myself as a scholar of the performing arts, literature, or classical music. However I have always been a careful observer and listener of what I see and hear. As I continuously witness the success and failure of attempts to implement business analytics, I compare them with Beethoven. Why?

The Anatomy of a Twitter Conversation, Visualized with R

DavidMSmith — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:10:59 +0000

Each new participant in the conversation is listed on the vertical axis - those Twitter users with several dots in their row were active participants. You can see the conversation is quite "bursty": active periods of replies and retweets punctuated by short pauses.

The Data Analytics of Super Bowl Commercials

Brett Stupakevich — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:26:10 +0000

Well, Super Bowl Sunday has come and gone.

Big Data, Unstructured Information Analysis is More Than Sentiment.

LScagliarini — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:15:52 +0000

Unstructured information is a significant part of the Big Data phenomena but automatic sentiment analysis is less than the tip of the iceberg for how to strategically use Big Data.

Swimming with the Smarter Customer: The Speedo International Story

BrentLeary — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:51:42 +0000

Speedo’s ecommerce team got busy figuring out what analytics capabilities they wanted. They were looking for a solution that “would let us go to another level of thinking, beyond looking at visitors and traffic. We wanted to really understand the customer, how they behave, how they think and how they liked to be interacted with, so that we could optimize marketing, retention and recruitment.”

'Society is Making Our IT Decisions for Us Now'

JoeMcKendrick — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:01 +0000

Cloud computing represents a tectonic shift for business technology and the people who run it. I recently had the chance to chat with David Nichols, principal and Americas CIO services leader for Ernst & Young IT Advisory Services, about the impact of cloud, shared services, and business-IT alignment in this new era.

Accelerating Analytics at MSU with Revolution R Enterprise

DavidMSmith — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:05:00 +0000

Erik Sigur, Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University, writes at ReadWriteWeb about using Revolution R Enterprise to provide high-performance computation in R to the researchers in his department:

Facebook: Why is Nobody Listening?

ComMetrics — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:05:14 +0000

Big Data: Will Open Source Software Challenge BI & Analytics Software Vendors

hkotadia1 — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Predictive Analytics has been billed as the next big thing for almost fifteen years, but hasn’t gained mass acceptance so far the way ERP and CRM solutions have. One of the main reason for this is the high upfront investment required in Software, Hardware and Talent for implementing a Predictive Analytics solution.

Big Data Analytics a Key Enabler for Social CRM – Airlines Case Study

hkotadia1 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:10:58 +0000

Here’s a simple yet very effective example of using analytics for understanding consumer attitudes towards airlines in real time. In this study, Jeffrey Breen has used the R programming language to analyze consumer sentiments about major U.S. airlines expressed on Twitter.

Revolution Analytics Hosts Contest on Business Predicting the Future

Dave Menninger — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:30:46 +0000

What software vendors, industry analysts and others call predictive analytics may be described more accurately as data mining. Data mining includes both predictive and descriptive analytics. Predictive analytics is used to predict future occurrences, such as the likelihood of an individual customer purchasing a particular product.