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Article sponsored by Sisense:  Businesses are gaining insights from data that simply were not possible just a few years ago. This capability is powered by a new breed of data visualisation tools, and the ability to morph complex data into a form that is suitable for analytical purposes. While most…

The usual approach to information technology and strategy is to treat IT as a pure cost, with the aim of improving business efficiency. This usually means lowering head count or, what is equivalent, doing more with the same head count. In straw polls I conducted at various seminars, only around…

The starting point in all of this is to define what information is. Information reduces uncertainty. It’s a powerful definition with many implications., and since there are actually well defined concepts around the value of information, we’ll start there. To illustrate the value of information I’ll use a simple example.…

Behavioral IT Written by Martin Butler Introduction When I came across behavioral studies in finance and economics I realized that I had found something that explained many of the behaviors that can manifest in the IT investment process. These behaviors, or biases as they are generally known, are part of…

Big data is exciting, full of potential, and dangerous. The term now encapsulates data mining, business intelligence, predictive analytics, data visualization, and pretty much everything else we might want to do with data. So, here are five ways you can really damage your business with big data: Predictive Analytics and…

Data visualization is great – isn’t it? With almost no learning curve, anyone can create a scatterplot, a pie chart, a heatmap – or any of a hundred different types of data visualization. The appeal is immediate. We are visual creatures – we like pictures, and particularly when they have…

We analyse data because we need to answer questions. What did sales look like last month? Why was production low in a particular unit? How has the customer base responded to the latest promotion? The questions are endless, and so is the need for business analytics technologies and methods. Fortunately…

For people with short attention spans – Big data is real, but short term it will cause more problems than it solves. The money people are investing in everything with the label big data attached to it and will create an investment bubble. Just as with the dot com boom,…

Business is the art of managing the uncertain. Machine learning, statistics, simulation, optimization and many other emerging disciplines are predominantly probability based. A predictive model may well express the probability that a loan applicant will be able to repay, as a probability (usually as a percentage). Simulations which use Monte…