Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, an Egyptian document more than 3,600 years old, introduces the roughly 85 problems by saying that he is presenting the "correct method of reckoning, for grasping the meaning of things and knowing everything that is, obscurities and all secrets."
Customer Retention
In the age of convergence, customer churn is a concern for service providers, challenging most retention techniques...
Is the Internet of things going to become the Hunger games of the future?
The world of technology is awash with news of data and analytics and how the combination can be used to get actionable insights. I really get confused with the concept of actionable insights because the whole idea of insights is to know about a person or thing better and only because you want to do something with the information – especially in the context of business. I am yet to come across an enterprise that invests money to get insights not knowing or wanting to do nothing with the information it gains.
Collaborative Analytics
The recent news of Amazon hosting all the data related to the human genome project and making it available to researchers across the world is a very good example of collaborative research for the betterment of mankind. I am sure this step will help to speed up research and make information available to smaller organisations that otherwise would have to spend a lot of time and money to get hold of such valuable information. We need more of these kinds of collaborative efforts to help not only industry to prosper but to also make solutions more accessible, available and affordable.
Retail Outside-In
A lot of work is being done in the space of retail analytics. In fact it was nice to see an advertisement by the Big Blue that talks about how they found out that a bakery sold more sandwiches when it rained and how they used analytics to get to this conclusion and how such conclusions will lead to a smarter planet.
Are you helping your competition through the cloud?
There a slew of companies that are providing cloud based or SaaS based services in the areas of advanced analytics and more so as the most used jargon goes ‘predictive analytics’ (it sometimes amuses me how the concept of predictive analytics is abused by companies to get google’s attention but that is for another blog). It is interesting to read about so many companies providing cloud based predictive analytics solution in fields as diverse as insurance claim management to sales forecasting and customer churn.
Another case for customised solutions
While concluding a recent project for a fortune 500 company my colleague came across a very peculiar problem. The model was delivering very good results in the Quality environment but failed miserably when it moved to the production environment.