Some years ago I asked political commentator James Carville a question he’d never heard before. Now I’m realizing it applies to today’s world of RFPs and sales calls. Read More
SMBs need help. An IDC survey reported that 80 percent of all SMBs are looking to employ technology to solve business problems. And they need people whom they can trust, as 72 percent of small businesses and 68 percent of medium businesses aren’t satisfied with their current tech. Read More
data scientists are going to allow data scientists and the companies for which they work to leverage themselves more. While data scientists understandably “don’t like to give the keys to the Ferrari to the 16-year-old,” as one such expert said, they’ll have to enable self-service.
These business users – who now are being called citizen data scientists – are beginning to find some things that need to be validated and investigated. That brings the data scientist back in place as a trusted adviser as a predictive model may need to be built to put into production or into an application to ultimately improve the business, according to Lisa Kart of Gartner, Inc. Read More
Discussion of future trends in business intelligence and analytics abound at Gartner BI conference this week. The traditional goal of achieving a single version of the truth is being challenged by the demands of business users for greater control, access and ultimately self-service BI. Read More
The New York Times, in a March 22 article, focused on the challenges for Kodak, the onetime king of photography, as it attempts to redefine itself in a fast-changing business environment.
Kodak’s researchers actually invented digital photography in the ’90s, but the company remained focused on the revenue generated from traditional photography. Even before cameras became an essential part of the smartphone, sales for traditional film were plummeting.
“For Kodak, the advent of digital photography was ruinous. Today it has $2 billion in annual sales, compared with $19 billion in 1990 when consumer film was king. It now has 8,000 employees worldwide; it had 145,000 at its peak,” the Times article points out.
The point here is to not single out Kodak for any past decisions or performance. The list of large 20th Century companies that could not adapt to a changing technological (or consumer) landscape is endless. Read More
Much has been written about big data and how it is revolutionizing business and business intelligence. Today, we’re going to give some recognition to a less hyped sibling – small data.
Allen Bonde, VP of Product Marketing and Innovation at Actuate, has been written about small data in many places, including the Small Data Group blog. His definition of small data:
“Small data connects people with timely, meaningful insights (derived from big data and/or “local” sources), organized and packaged – often visually – to be accessible, understandable, and actionable for everyday tasks.”
Put even more simply, big data is about machines; small data is about people. Read More
If anyone still has any doubts that the movement toward data-driven business is accelerating, take a look at the nation’s campuses.
Bachelor’s degrees in statistics have jumped 95% since 2010, according to Fortune magazine, citing new data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and reported by the American Statistical Association (ASA).
Computer science remains a leading STEM major (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), with a 92% increase in degrees over the same period. Programming and software development are not far behind. Read More
If you are following the business intelligence space, it seems that there are new surveys every week confirming the growing use of BI in a competitive landscape.
Whether the research comes from academia, research analysts, consultants, large enterprise solutions providers or smaller BI vendors, it all points in the same direction: We live in a fast-paced, data-driven world. Those organizations who don’t keep up will be left behind.
A global report from the consulting company Capgemini is one of the latest in a massive deluge of studies, which reflect this acceleration of data growth and the business world’s attempts to keep pace with it. Their survey found that 64 percent of enterprises in North and South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific believe that big data is changing traditional business boundaries. It also found:
User adoption of cloud business intelligence tools has jumped over the past three years and will continue to grow, but it’s clear that many organizations are still slow to take the leap because of security concerns even if they’re unfounded, according to multiple observers.
SearchBusinessAnalytics recently explored that hesitation in an interview with Howard Dresner, founder, president and chief research officer at consultancy Dresner Advisory Services. His company has conducted an annual Wisdom of Crowds Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study since 2012.
The article points out the Dresner survey found nearly two-third of the vendors consider cloud BI “critically important” to their businesses. However, more than half of them have no plans for cloud deployments. Read More
A recent article Small Business Trends article offers “4 Reasons Data Driven Small Businesses Are Embracing Big Data.”
The article includes this telling quote: “Previously the exclusive domain of statisticians, large corporations and information technology departments, the emerging availability of data and analytics – call it a new democratization – gives small businesses and consumers greater access to cost-effective, sophisticated, data-powered tools and analytical systems.”
A Tuesday press release from Izenda and Pareto Business Group, a Windsor, Ontario-based company, confirmed that statement. Pareto chose Izenda as a technology partner “because it provides enterprise class capabilities and superior usability, a value that allows for white-labeling to the small and mid-sized market.” (Read the full press release on PRWeb.) Read More
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