ABCtech #158 30MAR13 Analytics just keeps getting better

ABCtech #158 30MAR13 Analytics just keeps getting better

Contributions Welcome   Peter Kelly – Editor-in-Chief

12,000 Subscribers     Victor Panlilio – Research

• Discover. Employ huge data sets and analytics tools to better understand intricate topics such as: the universe and our origins, the earth’s climate and weather, the brain and behavior, and what’s relevant to you.

No implication is any more significant than the opportunity to feed the voracious appetite of people to be informed anytime, anywhere. For democracy, borders become irrelevant. For markets, data is a huge competitive asset for customizing service. For the professions, analytics may signal “the beginning of the end” of the professionally dominated, knowledge economy. The professional-client relationship features: waiting lists, high public and private costs and rising, and weak client engagement. Today’s clients are impatient with increasingly consumer-like expectations, to the chagrin of busy professionals. The “personalization” of professional markets has enormous implications for customizing service, speeding up responses and redefining the role of knowledge-intensive, expensive professionals – such as coaches, where relationship skills are in demand. By the way, and this may be peculiar to Alberta, “busy” has become a new by-word – an impersonal response to anyone asking “How are you!” 

Where knowledge-based decisions are error-prone, and yield to data, sensors monitor remote assets with system controls. Witness the promise of remote personal health monitors, unmanned vehicle transportation, customized entertainment, speed matchmaking, reprogrammable robotics in manufacturing. A new beginning. The time is now.

VISION & TRANSITIONS

IBM CEO on a Big Data + Analytics Culture and Mindset for the 21st Century.  Big Data, analytics, cloud, mobile and social technologies are transforming our world. This new era of computing provides the instrumentation, interconnection and intelligence that make it possible to build a smarter planet.  FOR TRANSCRIPT   FOR VIDEO

How Technology Can Transform the World.   The tools that technology provides mean we know more and we understand more about previously-thought-unsolvable problems. With this data informing our course we can describe the kind of world we want to live in and then without airy-fairyness or wishful thinking go after it. It’s the greatest opportunity that has ever been offered any generation. Which is the truth. Wow.”  FOR MORE

Accenture’s Technology Vision – Every business is a digital business   FOR MORE   AND MORE

Four Trends Revitalizing Business Intelligence. Business intelligence (BI) first emerged as a technology specialization in the mid-90s and, since then, it has evolved nonstop. But not since its early days has BI undergone such a dramatic period of innovation. Now, a series of technology advancements are converging to change how we think about BI, the ways we use data and analytics, and the role that BI plays in the enterprise. While each is important in its own right, each trend also acts as an enabler and driver, forming a virtual cycle of innovation that’s already transforming BI as we know it.  FOR MORE

CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 

“Sustainability” as a Lens for Growth, Innovation and Differentiation.  The chief strategy officer is at the heart of assessing how and where sustainability best fits, what changes it might bring to the organization’s overall business model and to plan out how to get there.  FOR MORE

Non-profit Organizations Face Unprecedented Challenges.  Global economic conditions mean a steady decline in government support as demands for their services increase.  FOR MORE

Analytics Projects Differ from IT Projects. In their quest to extract insights from the massive amounts of data now available from internal and external sources, many companies are spending heavily on IT tools and hiring data scientists. Yet most are struggling to achieve a worthwhile return. That’s because they treat their big data and analytics projects the same way they treat all IT projects, not realizing that the two are completely different animals.” FOR MORE

Consumer File-sharing Apps Lacking Corporate Governance. FOR MORE 

Improving End User Quality of Experience – Simplified, unified collaboratioin management. FOR MORE

EDUCATION & TRAINING

On-line Learning – A revolution for advanced education? For hundreds of years, brick-and-mortar universities were at the unchallenged pinnacle of education. In the last decades, remote and online education appeared. FOR MORE

How Do You Educate Billion People?  The edX partnership between MIT and Harvard University has grown from zero to almost 1 million students all over the world taking edX courses as diverse as statistics, computer science, life sciences and Greek heroism. edX is actually a re-imagining of education itself — both online and campus based. It serves up free online courses from leading scholars at a growing list of major universities (now 14). Anyone can register and edX is also integrated into traditional classroom teaching. But edX at its core is a research laboratory. A good part of that research involves collecting and analyzing the massive amounts of data edX collects in real time about every aspect of its process right down to the individual student’s experience.  FOR MORE

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Big Data Analytics in Education – Personalized learning. Big data analytics are coming to public education. In 2012, the US Department of Education (DOE) was part of a host of agencies to share a $200 million initiative to begin applying big data analytics to their respective functions. The DOE targeted its $25 million share of the budget toward efforts to understand how students learn at an individualized level. FOR MORE

Fragmented Data Systems – A barrier to better schools. Many districts and states struggle to provide meaningful, real-time data about student performance to educators. FOR MORE

Companies, Organizations Offer Ed-Tech Training Options. The courses take many formats, with some offered entirely online, while others are delivered face-to-face but include online follow-up support. FOR MORE

Technology Counts 2013 – Building the digital district. The 16th edition of Education Week’s annual report on educational technology tackles how school districts are working to incorporate more multimedia into classrooms, upgrade online professional development, and do a better job using data to improve student achievement.  FOR MORE

HEALTH & WELFARE

Pharmaceuticals Cautious Regarding Social Media.  Social media outlets are becoming a dominant form of advertising for large corporations as well as small businesses.  One industry has been slow to embrace the digital revolution, however:  pharmaceutical companies.  FOR MORE

Analytics Can Help Solve Global Poverty.  Bill Gates believes accurate measurements and concrete, tangible goals are central to improving conditions among the world’s poor.  FOR MORE

Big Data To Fight Traumatic Brain Injuries. UCLA’s Neurosurgery Department is testing out big data software which can prevent complications in patients with traumatic brain injuries. FOR MORE

FINANCE & BANKING INDUSTRY

Preparing Financial Institutions for Social media Compliance with the Impending Regulation.  FOR MORE

The Bank Branch of the Future – Developing new products and services with customers.  Streamlining processes, eliminating paper, and improving. FOR MORE

Banking, Finance & Insurance.  Winner for newsletter Banking Analytics Conference.  FOR MORE   AND MORE

        PERSPECTIVES – BANKING ANALYTICS

ENERGY INDUSTRY 

A Crystal Ball in the Oil Fields. The entrepreneurial instinct is still the ultimate predictive analytics tool, but you also need sophisticated data and an understanding of how analytics work. FOR MORE

Oil & Gas – Global IT Services Transformation In The POD  (Process Control Domain). FOR MORE

Analytics Serving the Energy Industry. FOR MORE

Digital Strategy Essential for the Oil and Gas Industry.  Cloud Computing and Virtualization to Cyber Security and the rise of Social Media, are playing an important role for ensuring profitability and competitiveness. FOR MORE

The Key IT Challenges in Oil & Gas in 2013 by Oil & Gas IQ Surveys. FOR MORE

REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY

Real Estate Analytics – Large data sets improve portfolio management.  The project used stringent portfolio management guidelines to determine capabilities, worked with the business side to develop cost-benefit analyses for every requested capability and looked at the hard and soft benefits of launching a business-wide data warehouse.  FOR MORE

LOGISTICS & TRANSPORTATION

Why a Sustainable Supply Chain is Good Business. FOR MORE    AND MORE

High-speed Transportation Relies on Data Analytics for Safety and Performance.  Magnovate Technologies is commercializing a proprietary maglev technology called Magline with technology advances that overcome the previous technical and economic limitations that have prevented widespread adoption of maglev for high speed travel.  Magline’s high-speed, passive switching enables maglev vehicles to eliminate heavy trains in favor of a “packet switching” model; a pipeline of individual, computer-controlled, driverless vehicles that create a Magline Automated Transit Network (ATN). The first electric telecommunication systems utilized hardwired point-to-point connections, and then gradually progressed to automated mechanical circuit switching. But the Internet revolution didn’t happen until circuit switching gave way to packet switching. We are now on the verge of a similar revolution in high speed ground transportation. FOR  MORE 

ICT  INDUSTRY

Canada’s ICT Industry (2012): A National Perspective.  An in-depth analysis of Canada’s leading ICT companies, each of the provinces and regions, and an in-depth examination of each Canadian ICT Industry sub-sector Plus an extensive discussion on the happenings within the Canadian ICT industry during the past three years.  FOR MORE

INDUSTRY LEADERS PERSPECTIVES

Peter F. Drucker –  invented modern management, made observation his life’s work. His seemingly simple ideas often elicited startling results.  Drucker once said: “Innovation is the design and development of something new, as yet unknown and not in existence, which will establish a new economic configuration out of the old, known, existing elements. It will give these elements an entirely new economic dimension. It is the missing link between having a number of disconnected elements, each marginally effective, and an integrated system of great power.”

WEB Science and the Semantic Web. The Web is humanity connected – a lot of brains connected together. It’s not at the moment a big brain. It doesn’t itself have its own thoughts, but it is a system that allows us to solve problems more or less well, depending on how we manage to interact.  FOR A CONVERSATION WITH TIM BERNERS-LEE  – a British engineer and computer scientist and MIT professor credited with inventing the World Wide Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web’s continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

Reinventing What It Means to Have a Human Society.  With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire—it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big data brings us to interesting times. FOR ALEX ‘SANDY’ PENTLAND’S INSIGHTS  – a pioneer in big data, computational social science, mobile and health systems, and technology for developing countries. He is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world and was named by Forbes as one of the world’s seven most powerful data scientists.

ANALYTICS TOOLS

Webopedia – Maintains a database of concise and relevant technology definitions. FOR MORE

CrunchBase – Maintains a database of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit. Here, you can learn and edit everything about companies like Facebook, YouTube, Tagged, Twitter, MySpace and  products like Droid and Google Wave, and people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs.  FOR MORE

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS  DEFINED

The Value and Scope of Predictive Analytics. An Expert Viewpoint from ISO Innovative Analytics.  FOR MORE

Video Validating Predictive Analytics Highlights VIDEO HERE

Predictive Analytics in 2020 on AnalyticBridge BLOG HERE

Machine Learning + Human Expertise = Better Predictions. Including domain knowledge into predictive models provides competitive advantage. FOR MORE

Strategies for Using Google Analytics Effectively. Ten standard reports you should know well, especially if you’re only a part-time user.  FOR MORE

Analytics Vendors Must Make Prediction Easier.  FOR MORE AND MORE

Predictive Analytics Software is at the Cutting Edge of Information Technology. IT is empowering organizations to generate the critical insight they demand today for a wide range of challenges they face tomorrow. The analyst firm IDC has found that business applications involving predictive analytics software generate an average ROI of 145 percent.  FOR MORE

Prescriptive Business Analytics – can be current and dynamic. Prescriptive analytics can continually and automatically process new data to improve the accuracy of predictions and provide better decision options.  FOR MORE

Predicting B2B Customer Behaviour. Effective recommendation models for B2B sales teams are different from B2C models. FOR MORE

Broad Market Analytics Monitored for Disconnects.   Mining massive amounts of real-time data—data that goes beyond company guidance, beyond consensus, beyond the reach of traditional research can help identify disconnects from Street consensus and catch inflection points ahead of the market. FOR MORE

MARKETING – SERVICES & PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Analytics for Increasing Profits and Improved Productivity.  Many of the world’s biggest multinatioinals are now deplying analytics 2.0, a set of capabiities that can chew through terabytes of data and hundreds of variables in real time.  It allows these companies to create an ultra-high-definition picture of their marketing performance, run scenarios, and change ad strategies on the fly. Enabled by recent exponential leaps in computing power, cloud-based analytics, and cheap data storage, these predictive tools measure the interaction of advertising across media and sales channels, and they identify precisely how exogenous variables (including the broader economy, competitive offerings, and even the weather) affect ad performance. The resulting analyses, put simply, reveal what really works. With these data-driven insights, companies can often maintain their existing budgets yet achieve improvements of 10% to 30% (sometimes more) in marketing performance.”  FOR MORE

Stop “Swim-Lane” Measurement of Ad Performance. Single-channel measurement underestimates revenues attributable to social-media marketing and display advertising while overestimating PR and paid-search revenue. FOR MORE

Tropicana Orange Juice Formulated Using Analytics.  Data about myriad flavors in an orange, and consumer preferences, are matched to a profile detailing acidity, sweetness, and other attributes. FOR MORE

Customer Analytics, Not Web Analytics. It’s not traffic numbers that matter, but rather real customers and their engagement with your site and product. FOR MORE

Advanced Technology Delivers Powerful Consumer Insight in Seconds.  FOR MORE

The World’s Largest Survey of Business Intelligence Software Users.  Peer groups are used to ensure similar products are compared against each other both in fairness to the vendor and for the benefit of the customer. The groups are essential to allow fair and useful comparisons of products that are likely to compete. The peer groups are primarily data driven and based on how customers say they use the product.  FOR MORE

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

3.2 Billion Likes and Comments are Posted to Facebook Each Day?  Over that same period, more than 200 million Twitter users write and share hundreds of millions of Tweets, 500 years of YouTube videos are watched on Facebook alone and 40 million photos are uploaded to Instagram.Can your mind imagine that more than 500 years of YouTube video is watched everyday? It took us a second to cope with that.  FOR MORE

75.4 Percent of Brands Now Use Social Media for Business Purposes.  And four out of ten have been doing so for more than two years Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have revolutionised marketing, sales and community engagement for the vast majority of brands, but what about within the workplace itself – are businesses practicing what they preach by letting employees use social media in the office?  FOR MORE

Accelerating Leadership in Social Media Marketing Services.  IDG Amplify, introduced in early 2008 was IDG’s first packaged social media services program offering. Since it’s inception, there have been more than 200 IDG Amplify programs executed in more than 12 countries globally. IDG Amplify’s base service was focused on social media advertising services and evolved to include more 20 different program options. FOR MORE  AND MORE

MOBILITY

The Five Big Lies About Going Mobile.  Mobile hasn’t been around long, but it has already made a tremendous impact to the tune of 29 billion apps downloaded in 2011. With such a new technology, it’s not surprising that a lot of misinformation is floating around. Learn how to develop an effective mobile initiative. FOR MORE

DATA MANAGEMENT

Big Data Perceptions: Good, Bad, and Ugly.  Big data is in its infancy, and organizations are still grappling with what it means.  FOR MORE

Big Data Means…Big Errors. You can hardly trust statistically oriented sciences or empirical studies these days.  FOR MORE

Big Data’s Big Hurdle – Government policy. Big data, and particularly the ability to collect huge bits of unstructured data, has changed how the government gathers information. What used to be a linear approach to information gathering is now a “topsy-turvy” approach where mined data can infringe on existing privacy laws. FOR MORE

Gleaning Knowledge from Big Data Sets – Beyond “key word” searches.  While enterprise search solutions and generalized keyword search engines may be sufficient for some populations of knowledge workers, engineers and other folks focused creating new products, optimizing processes, finding new markets and improving existing products – require a specialized search capability. For engineers and other professionals tasked technical problem solving, conventional search technologies, advanced Boolean searches and statistically-based methods are a failed strategy because the process of matching keywords cannot understand the context of the user’s request – their design intent and need. FOR MORE   AND MORE

Good Data Won’t Guarantee Good Decisions. Analytics can be useless, even harmful, if staff can’t use and interpret data properly. FOR MORE

Cloud and Big Data: Now One and the Same? Commercial, scientific and government organizations are collecting new types of data and bringing them into a new type of cloud. FOR MORE

Managing Massive Data Sets.  The sheer mass of information available about consumers on the web is enough to scare marketers into ignoring it. But for those brave enough to confront and harness big data, there are large rewards.  FOR MORE

Caution Advised. Does the consumer approve of (or even know about) the use to which businesses are putting their non volunteered information? FOR MORE

Fast Clustering Algorithms for Massive Datasets” on Big Data News “. BLOG HERE

Something’s Missing from the Big Data Discussions.  Big Data Analytics doesn’t take place in a vacuum. It takes place in the enterprise. And any time you mix data and the enterprise, you can’t afford to ignore data management best practices. It may not be as sexy as predictive analytics, but failure to apply fundamental data management best practices to Big Data projects can lead not just to failed projects, but to potential legal consequences as well. FOR MORE

Big Data Vendor Revenue and Market Forecast 2012-2017.  The Big Data market is projected to reach $18.1 billion in 2013, an annual growth. FOR MORE

CENTRES OF INNOVATION & ANALYTICS

About the Institute for Advanced Analytics  FOR MORE  and it’s FOUNDER

IT Law Wikia: Innovation and commercialization of emerging technologies. An examination of the complexities of innovation and commercialization in an attempt to demonstrate the linkages with science and  technology, and to highlight the growing importance of factors other than basic research in commercial success.  FOR MORE

The Centre for Emerging Technologies: Creating an environment that fosters technology and technology-driven enterprise development.  FOR MORE

Rutgers University: The commercialization of emerging technologies – An innovative transformation of knowledge into commercial products and services.  The course begins by examining concepts associated with technology commercialization and then takes a deeper dive into intellectual property, new venture creation, valuation, and assessment methodology. Concepts are introduced that improve and accelerate the commercialization process, from decisions made by scientists at the research bench, through the development, patenting, and licensing of new technologies, to the formation of entrepreneurial enterprises. FOR MORE

Princeton University: Innovation and commercial innovation.  Successful R&D alone cannot assure commercial success in areas of advanced technology. Firms must also develop or acquire the capabilities to design, manufacture, and market new products, processes, and service  FOR MORE

Stanford University: StartX is a community of the best startup founders out of Stanford.  Designed, built and run by Stanford founders, StartX provides structured access to the information, resources and networks that propel a startup founder forward. Our mission is to identify and accelerate the development of the highest-potential Stanford founders through experiential education and collective intelligence. We are here to cultivate a community of the best founders out of Stanford, and to allow them to use their collective strength to grow as individuals and leverage each other for life.” FOR MORE

The Renaissance Revisited         By: Perry Kinkaide, Founder & Past President – Alberta Council of Technologies

Analytics just keeps getting better. Two years ago our theme “Off-loading Intelligence – When Machines Decide!” was punctuated with repeated declarations of: “It’s sooner than you think!” And then in 2012, encouraged by IBM’s Watson winning Jeopardy, and popularized by Hollywood’s film ‘Moneyball,’ we tweaked the theme and organized our Conference to reflect the popularity of “Analytics, Big Data, and The Cloud”. The associated Conference for 2013 reconvenes in BOTH Calgary and Edmonton May 13-15th – visit BESTofANALYTICS.com  (ABCtech subscribers receive a 10% discount when Registering On-line using the Subscriber discount CODE ABCtech4U ) Featured panels portray a wide-array of Alberta applications and commercialization issues across industry, research and government. Key features are broadcast via WebTV between sites and globally. The ICT data-storage/processing industry continues to morph into a service. And, apps that are programmed to actually learn are imminent. It’s just a matter of time, and indeed – ‘sooner than you think’.

The market for analytics continues to attract broad interest as an aide to decision making from varied industries and professions; just see the range of perspectives shared in this newsletter. This Renaissance Revisited features the governments of the US and Canada declaring policies of Open Data and managers being challenged to surface and secure answers from reservoirs of formerly ignored data. To secure a strong advantage and keep up with NOW, the leaders of today MUST:

• Anticipate. Employ predictive analytics for securing improved customer service, program/product evaluation and design, and as a means to increase market share
• Get Nimble. Remove cultural barriers, archaic policies and hierarchical structures impeding responsiveness
• Learn. Seek out anomalies, the source of innovation
• Collaborate. Improve ease of access to data and integrate siloed data sources
• Decide. Increase productivity employing data as an aide to decision making
• Automate. Investigate algorithms for possibly automating labour intensive/error prone management processes
• Compete. Treat data as an asset and employ analytics for a competitive edge

ACCENTURE

FICO

RAMCO

TABLEAU

 COGNITRO

IBM

SAP

THE IE GROUP

DELOITTE

I-EXCEE

SAS

JOB SEARCH

Mature experienced senior manager looking for a full-time position in Alberta.  Last major project was successfully completed on time and budget, the result was $10 million in funding awarded by the GOA. Skills include – Microsoft Office 2010 with Publisher, Visio and Project Management and Raisers Edge.   FOR MORE

EDITOR’S DROP BOX

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