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Every time the human race has been faced with an explosion of information and data, so a period of decline has followed. The introduction of the printing press ushered in a couple of hundred years of religious wars, because of the widespread availability of books and documents that promoted this…

The philosopher Seneca was once the wealthiest man on earth. So much so that the Emperor of Rome felt threatened and ordered Seneca to commit suicide – which he did after a few technical hitches. And because contemporary people tend to listen to the nonsense that comes from the mouths of…

The Future of Business Analytics For those handicapped by very short attention spans – business analytics will not consist of people creating charts, graphs and other pretty data using the latest visual analytics platforms. This is to some extent a temporary aberration (for reasons to be discussed later). Business analytics…

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…

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…

The analysis of data is littered with potholes. Here is a list of 7 deadly sins which affect the use of business intelligence: Poor data quality. Data can suffer from a number of ailments – incorrect values, missing values, default values, and so on. Don’t underestimate the effect that poor…