Breaking Bad: Show’s over, but the business lessons remain

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. If you read further, you will be aware of how Breaking Bad ended. We warned you… It’s hard to believe Breaking Bad has reached its conclusion. Who imagined that Jesse would take out Todd, Walt would take out everyone else and that Lydia would succumb to Stevia (in a way…). It has […]

Big Data calls for the rise of the citizen developer

John Skovron has over twenty years of experience working with systems that run mega scale grid computing solutions. These are the systems used primarily at financial trading shops that are able to compute against loosely coupled, high variety and distributed data that most of the world wouldn’t ever consider as possible. When he slows down […]

4 Secrets of Killer Loyalty Programs

Few things hold more promise right now than Big Data, mobility, social platforms, and cloud computing. Their impact on brand loyalty and customer engagement management is enormous. The reasons aren’t that hard to figure out and look like this: Big Data brings a rich tapestry of information together at the perfect moments for customer engagement. […]

Analytics is the marriage of geek and (business) jock

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 […]

Big Data’s dark corners

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 […]

How to do data science without a data scientist

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 […]

Surprise: iOS 7 and the iPhone 5S are a Killer Customer Engagement Platform

Apple gave customer engagement management a tremendous boost with its release of the iPhone 5S and iOS 7, and most people don’t even realize it. While much of the world is talking about the smartphone’s fingerprint sensor and other obvious features, Apple quietly (very quietly, in fact) introduced much faster, separate processors that make their […]

Advanced analytics doesn’t have to be so hard

Bruno Aziza describes himself as a “data geek.” From his roles with Microsoft and BusinessObjects/SAP to SiSense, he has been on a mission to bring advanced analytics to the business user for over a decade. We first met Bruno when he spoke at Interop’s Big Data Workshop in Las Vegas last May and shared thoughts on […]

Mobility requires a different kind of infrastructure

The following is a guest post by Sean O’Shaughnessey. With the launch of the iPhone 5S, consumers have been treated to yet another leap forward in technology and ease of use, but that creates a problem as well. Enterprise consumers of mobile applications are setting their expectations of performance based on popular consumer applications on […]

Now do you believe social connections are currency??

It’s actually fun to watch a hot trend move from hype to something that we simply expect. Big data will get there, hopefully soon, and social media is already arriving at that point. How do we know? Creativity. When the hype passes, the paradigm change has taken place in people’s minds and we start to […]

Taking a look at Business Process Management: The Next Wave

These are crazy times for change, threatening to disrupt so much of what we’ve worked so hard to achieve over the past decades of information technology and business process. The toughest part of disruption is knowing that what took so much energy to figure out can be so quickly plowed under by something smarter, faster […]

The surprising gift that comes with the iPhone 5S

Whether we realized it or not (they didn’t make a big deal out of it), Apple launched the iPhone 5S with a special gift for the consumer and business alike. People spent the night on sidewalks to buy the next incarnation of Apple’s red-hot smartphone without even realizing it. Before I saw what it was, […]

The intersection of marketing and Big Data

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 […]

Process is data and data is process

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 […]

Analytics at the core of customer engagement

There’s so much customer data around us, and it gets richer and faster each and every day. People are talking non-stop about Big Data and its many uses in various parts of the market. But what’s not really getting as much attention is how analytics are used to make loyalty platforms effective for meaningful customer […]

Twitter: you’ve come a long way, Baby

Ah, Twitter. You and I have had an interesting relationship over the years. More than once, I tried to start using you only to find your streams of information hard to follow and distracting at the same time. You’re unfair, too. While some tweet innocuous nonsense to millions of followers, I see my followers come […]