Q&A: For companies (or sports teams) looking to succeed, think analytics
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There's going to be a 'talent race' for people with strong analytical skills, says Babson College professor and author Thomas H. Davenport, who noted that a number of successful companies -- and sports teams -- have turned to analytics to outdo rivals.
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One way to compete with a team whose payroll is more than $100 million dollars more than yours is to do all you can to make sure you're not going to beat yourself.
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How do you fight a much larger rival? Hire its best managers.
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Scanning the lists of teams who haveÃÂ already clinched playoff spots, one would be hard-pressed to find a single team without serious flaws and serious questions.
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Corporate sustainability is all the rage. But what's real and what's bull? Where are the pitfalls? What works? We take a look.
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Need to evaluate an unprofitable company? This metric may help.
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(InfoWorld) - If Werner Heisenberg had pursued business analytics in the early 21st century instead of quantum physics in the early 20th, he might have struck on a different uncertainty principle: If your analysis and decision-making capabilities don't keep pace with the explosion of critical event data across enterprise networks today, soon you won't know the state of your business, the direction it's heading, or how fast it's getting there.Â  A host of technology companies are working on the science behind taking these measurements. Perhaps the newest of these event stream processing or complex event processing vendors is Amalgamated Insight, a Silicon Valley startup founded on work led by co-founder and CTO Michael Franklin at U.C. Berkeley, where Franklin is a professor of computer science. Amalgamated is just emerging from stealth mode and may have a new name by the time you read this. The seed of Amalgamated was planted in Franklin's frustration at what he considered wrong-headed approaches to the analysis problem. Many seemed to think that analyzing event streams -- be they RFID events from sensor networks, service events from SOA networks, system events from traditional networks, events from financial markets, or other kinds of electronic transactions -- was merely a matter of plumbing. If you could just get this device talking with that device, you would somehow enable pervasive computing. "And my view," Franklin recalls, "was that once you solved the plumbing problems, what you've got is a data management problem. Because you've got huge volumes of data being created all over the place. Lots of applications need that data, and lots of users need insight into what's going on in these dispersed environments." Beyond the plumbing, others were trying to reinvent the wheel. Attending an RFID standardization meeting as a guest, Franklin listened as group after group, each working at a different level of the system, described the data at their level and how to access it. And he realized, each one was defining a data model and a query language, and each one was different. That's when the seed sprouted. "Sitting there as a database guy, I was just getting irritated," he says. "Jeez, why wouldn't you just use SQL for all of this stuff across all the levels? And on the way home from that meeting, I realized, well, you know, why don't I just do that." Amalgamated's three-part solution combines a stream processing engine, a Java-based integration framework, and a visualization front end based on Adobe Flex. Naturally, the processing engine, which is embedded into the open-source PostgreSQL database, uses SQL to continuously query events as they flow past. "It lets you write SQL queries that are basically always running," Franklin explains. "They're always producing the answer so far based on the data they've seen so far." To enable SQL to query infinite data streams, Amalgamated extended it in two ways, adding a windowing capability to restrict the amount of data it would be exposed to in any instant and adding some "syntactic sugar" to define event patterns you might want to inspect. The "continuous analysis" engine is adaptive, Franklin says, meaning you can add or remove queries on the fly. Amalgamated sees the decision to embed the core processing engine in Postgres not only as key to advancing the development effort, but also as a key differentiator in the marketplace. Franklin notes that it gave the solution complete SQL, JDBC, and ODBC interfaces, internationalization, and all of the extensibility of Postgres right out of the box. As Boyd Pierce, the company's president and CEO, points out, Postgres lets users of Amalgamated's engine to write SQL that joins tables and streams, provides subqueries and views, and does all the magic that SQL can do. Programmers already know how to code in it. "We got all that based on having Postgres," Pierce notes. "But the other thing we've found in dealing with customers in our application space is that if you don't have a relational database that speaks full SQL and lets people program, you're hugely disadvantaged in terms of doing what the customer needs." Noting that Postgres allowed Amalgamated "to jump in front of a 10-year database systems development curve," Franklin sees a larger lesson in building on the open-source database. "We really hit upon what I think is the future of enterprise software development," he concludes. "If you start from scratch today, if you're building anything complex, you're crazy. That's just not going to be a viable way to build enterprise software in the future. You're going to have to leverage open source and other available tools that are out there."
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Inside info from company bigwigs can be a good or bad thing.
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In most sports, there are athletes built for the long haul, and those who dazzle in quick, mercurial bursts. Track and field has distance specialists and sprinters. Baseball has starting pitchers, setup men, and closers. Based on anecdotal evidence collected from 40-odd years immersed in sports literature, I suspect sportswriters fall into roughly the same categories. Like the starting pitcher who is awkwardly relegated to the bullpen, some writers aren't a great fit for every project. Lars Anderson, author of "Carlisle vs. Army," is a case in point.
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New data gives a peek into how the players are posed to do.
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Usually at sporting events, people know who wins and who loses or who comes in first, second, third and so forth by the score. In fact, there is no other way to run athletic competitions; most would agree
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How to analyze a company's inventory as a measure of performance.
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To determine how good a company is, it helps to consider the characteristics of the perfect business.
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Looking to beat the market this year and beyond? We have some ideas.
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(Source: Tibco)  So you have a few analysis-savvy experts but a lot of business users needing to solve both repeatable and unpredictable problems. What do you do to scale properly? Using Guided Analytics, expert business professionals can use powerful and easy-to-use data analysis applications to easily and quickly create analysis templates and recommended workflows, thus effectively transferring their best-practice analytics to general corporate users, without IT intervention! That speeds up decision-making by automating common analysis tasks, capturing best practices and providing a framework for distribution of analysis applications to meet the ever-changing needs of their organization.
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A new word-of-mouth research firm is attempting to demystify chatter about brands in the offline world.
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There's a lot of data out there, but using it wisely is a challenge. In this Executive Briefing, we look at the theory and practice of data-driven decision making. We hear from experts and examine successful implementations of information management technologies.