Exec Stream

It is often said that the only people who made their fortunes in the California gold rush were those selling spades and sieves. There is a striking similarity with the contemporary rush to anything with names such as “analytics”, “predictive analytics”, “machine learning” and so on. The people selling the…

This is a very long article. A PDF can be downloaded here. Summary The proclamation that data is our greatest latent asset is often made, and usually without much elaboration. Other than being a convenient cliché for technology suppliers, what does this assertion mean? To answer this question, we need…

You may, or may not be aware that the use of information technology in business has never been correlated with productivity. This goes back a long way – way back to the famous statement by Robert Solow in the 1980s: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”…

“Core values” is a commonly used phrased in today’s modern business language, but because they’re sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably with terms like “mission statement” and “corporate goals,” it’s important to clarify the definition of what organizational values really are. In doing so, executives can ensure they’re using their goals and…

Is visual analytics the final victory of form over content? For sure the business world has fallen in love with pretty graphics and reassuring dashboards, although I personally tire of people posting their latest chart showing the distribution of sharks around the globe, or net migration of people, as if…

A couple of decades ago a plucky character called Paul Strassmann produced a paper called “Outsourcing: A Game for Losers”. Now Strassmann had been CIO of Xerox and would later be CIO for part of the US Defense Department, so he was quite a high profile figure. I knew Paul…

Perhaps the only benefit of being involved in the IT industry for a protracted period is that things repeat, and as a result it becomes fairly straightforward to estimate how trends might develop. When relational database was introduced in the early eighties, it became the province of various geeks (of…

This is a long article. A PDF can be downloaded here. Analytics in itself is not of course profitable, it’s a cost. However converting analysis into more effective decisions, is the way to potentially improve revenue and profitability. This is the only role for analytics, and the reason we invest…

The application of analytical techniques to business is the most difficult of all domains to tackle. Applying machine learning to astronomical data, or driverless cars, or medical diagnosis, is much easier, simply because the behavior of stars, cars and the human body are fairly constant. Once an algorithm has found…