SuccessfulWorkplace

Every day we get to see misdirected, mindless marketing material. You’d think with all of the conversation about Big Data and analytics, we’d be past that by now, but it doesn’t feel like we are. Why isn’t Big Data changing our world in more visible ways? Why aren’t analytics being used to target the right […]

Two things happened this morning. The first was that I chose to break a long-standing rule and signed up for the New York times monthly subscription. Ugh, the hated paywall. As cordcutters, we pay for very little of our news and entertainment, Netflix aside. Which is how the second thing happened. I paid because they […]

2013 was an enormous year for two kinds of big…Big Brother and Big Data. On June 9, 2013, the world became aware of Edward Snowden, a geeky young NSA analyst who introduced us to the largest personal surveillance operation ever created. He showed us they don’t have to listen to your conversations in today’s analytics […]

In 2012 the Senseable City Lab, part of MIT, conducted an experiment called Trash Track to see just what happens when someone takes out the trash. By attaching transmitters to over 3,000 pieces of rubbish they were able to track where that item went, whether they went to the correct recycling facility or not, and how far […]

In a previous post, Preparing for the internet of things, extreme scalability, real-time event handling, and time-to-insight were given as the three biggest challenges for Big Data and the Internet of Things. These are challenges that can be addressed now if companies are ready to invest and be proactive about what’s surely coming in the next […]

We’ve heard the phrase, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” since childhood. We were being told by wiser adults to value what we have over the things we don’t. Customer engagement has the same lesson at its heart: We can more easily achieve our goals by creating better, more loyal […]

I attended The Big Data Conference in Chicago these past three days and noticed common threads consistently woven through each session and side conversation. First, we’re beyond the questions about what big data means (finally…I heard no V’s for three days). Instead, the conversations centered on where to get started, what approach to take, and […]

What’s the value of yesterday’s newspaper? Not much. What’s the value of tomorrow’s? Priceless. We’re fast moving into a world where tomorrow’s news is accessible today. The chips light When I flew for the US Navy back in the 90′s, I was fascinated by something we called the “chips light.” The chips light was the […]

Even when Google Glass was only a rumor, there were questions about whether it was a glimpse of the future or just a gimmick. It was enough of a question that it made the Weekend Update on Saturday Night LIve as the cast ridiculed the device (it was very, very funny). It was clear that […]

Harvard Business Review published a really interesting interview with Nate Silver this week. Silver was asked about how to approach analytics based on several different points of entry to the field. One of the best questions involved how an organization should deploy ‘stat heads’, Silver’s term for data analytics experts. The interviewer wanted to know if […]

Fabless Labs CEO Piyush Govil isn’t the loudest voice in the room but is often the smartest when it comes to Big Data. His work with VinSpin, an app that provides a new way to choose wine, was written up last year in the Harvard Business Review as an example of bringing Big Data to the […]

We’ve all heard by now that data scientists are in short supply. According to the TIBCO Spotfire Trends and Outliers Blog, this isn’t a problem that’s going away any time soon: According to McKinsey Global Institute, the US could be facing a shortage of 190,000 people with analytical skills by 2018. McKinsey isn’t the only organization […]

There are few topics hotter than Big Data. There are few professions being transformed by Big Data more than marketing, with the conversation rapidly shifting to customer engagement through loyalty programs; these include mobile, social, and other channel data as part of an omni-channel loyalty platform. Just as quickly as we digitize our world, we […]

We’re a funny lot. For years we’ve been talking about data and process as though they were two different things. Guess what…they’re not. Process involves the activities of getting work done and data both describes process and is also the beginning and end points of work. We consume data in processes and we produce data […]