Having proved the value of data visualizations in corporate decision-making, Gramener advances one step further into Data Driven Journalism by putting the power of data visualizations in the hands of the public – giving them important yet easily understood insight of the political scenario.

Vijay Karnataka, a Daily Kannada newspaper (part of TOI group), recently published articles over a period of 6 weeks, containing Gramener’s visualizations that offer its readers a never-before-experienced level of insight into important aspects of the State’s political environment, individual politicians, and the democratic environment  itself.

Effectively the visualizations helped people in consumption of data about attributes like – wealth possessed by MLA’s, their attendance to the assembly, performance, accessibility and trustworthiness.

Mr. SugataSrinivasaraju – Editor Vijay Karnataka (Karnataka’s No.1 Daily), says: “Facts and figures are sacred for a newspaper. They form the credible core of any publication. However, readers would consume them only when they are presented in an interesting and consumable fashion. This election season, the experiment of visualising poll data that Vijay Karnataka carried out in association with Gramener has been a very fruitful and rewarding exercise. We were able to generate tremendous reader interest and reaction to the many ‘cartograms’, ‘scatter plots’ and ‘sun bursts’ that we published over six weeks. This was possible because the visualisations were accessible, engaging and offered a unique insight into the elections. Besides, they also provided a futuristic dimension to the big game of democracy.”

The visualization below depicts – the amount of wealth possessed by a candidate, when converted to money could block the main gate of the Karnataka Assembly.

http://www.vijaykarnatakaepaper.com/epaperpdf/2632013/2632013-md-hr-9.pdf

Tree map of amount of assets across parties.

Below Karnataka map represents total assets of candidates in each constituency.

Musical Sunburst of Attendance percentage of MLA’s

http://www.vijaykarnatakaepaper.com/epaperpdf/942013/942013-md-hr-11.pdf

Musical sunburst representing Average score of each MLA for peformance,accessibility and trustworthiness based on survey.

Numbers with a view

How to give numbers a picture? A group of data collectors, data users and analysts in Bangalore has an answer. Part of Open Data, they are at work “visualising” data on politics ahead of the coming general elections.

Last month, at an Open Data “unconference”, a set of 32 slides termed ‘Visualising Politics’ was unveiled and put online (http://www.slideshare.net/gramener/visualising-politics) as an example of how “seeing” can make a difference in understanding cluttered tables that sometimes only the trained eye can make sense of.

Sensing the interest in the subject with crucial polls lined up, this group comprising professionals from the private sector as well as those associated with the National Informatics Centre and Census believes the data in the form they have presented can help voters, and those looking for connections between policies and how people vote, find some answers.

According to the group that first connected online, this is of particular importance in India given the sheer volume of data generated in the country, by the government, the RTI applications and other individuals.

The Bangalore ‘unconference’ was Open Data’s second annual meeting, and the key mover was Chief Data Scientist S Anand of Gramener. A Bangalore-based company, Gramener has been grappling with how to make “big” data in a country like India more accessible and readable, thereby allowing it to be used more intelligently and widely.

Says Anand: “We want to make slides that play with numbers and tables available anyway. But helping others visualise or see this as pictures makes it easy to assimilate and use the data.”

Plotting data for largely the 2004 general elections, the group has arrived at some interesting conclusions. For example, the percentage of votes polled is consistently inverse to the number of contestants in a race; and also, that the more densely populated a constituency, lower the voting. Another interesting data shows that as the number of contestants increases, the percentage margin by which a winner wins increases.

If some of the group’s data shows differences in voter participation across regions, another brings out that Udaipur was the only constituency in the country where women contestants outnumbered men in the 2004 general elections; the men lost their deposits.

The group is now working on other data, such as foreign currency received by NGOs, Karnataka Assembly results from last time and Lok Sabha attendance, mapped party wise.

Analysts familiar with government data collection have always maintained that India’s ability to collect data for various things, across vast and inaccessible regions and people, is commendable. However, even in large exercises such as the Census, the data is collected but without necessarily seeking answers to any correlations between variables. So, sifting in the data, there is a tremendous scope to look for specific answers to specific questions, which “visualising” helps make clear.

Several companies and NGOs working with Gramener use the data to plan the relationship between problems and policies better.

Amrtha Kasturi Rangan, who works with Arghym, a foundation working on rural sanitation, says “visualisation” of big data sets often seen as clunky otherwise is very helpful.

“The government set aside around Rs 3,500 crore last year (before revision) for rural sanitation. The data on the spends and achievements is available on their website. Our effort is to help translate these numbers into a more understandable format and we see the utility of having visualisations for this. This will help both decision makers and civil society understand progress of rural sanitation at a glance. We hope that these can be then used as a governance tool to help decipher patterns, trends, good examples and anomalies,” says Rangan.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/numbers-with-a-view/1098696/0

]]> http://blog.gramener.com/1020/indian-express-covers-gramener-at-open-data-unconference/feed 0 http://blog.gramener.com/1020/indian-express-covers-gramener-at-open-data-unconference?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=indian-express-covers-gramener-at-open-data-unconference http://feeds.gramener.com/~r/gramener-blog/~3/bpQfalRfvvY/data-science-news-20 http://blog.gramener.com/1012/data-science-news-20#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:27:37 +0000 Gramener PR http://blog.gramener.com/?p=1012 Continue reading →]]> The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis, the movie tells the story of how Beane single-handedly changed the face of baseball using data analytics 

In Bennett Miller’s Oscar nominated movie Moneyball (2011), Brad Pitt plays the real life character of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a struggling team in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the United States.

Based on the book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis, the movie tells the story of how Beane single-handedly changed the face of baseball using data analytics in his quest for becoming a successful team on a small budget, competing against teams with massive payrolls such as the New York Yankees.

With the emergence of data mining and the field of analytics, known as “Big Data”, the vast amounts of statistics that are collected for each player, team, game, and season are beginning to have new meaning that is beyond just a cumulative measure of an athlete’s or team’s performance. Data mining can be used by sports organisations for statistical analysis, pattern discovery, as well as outcome prediction, because patterns in data are often helpful in forecasting future events.

In a pivotal scene from Moneyball, the character Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) says to Beane, “Baseball thinking is medieval. It’s stuck in the Dark Ages. I have a more scientific view of the game.” And science is what made all the difference.

From the mail to McDonald’s, big data is all around us 

Big data helps mail your letters, it makes your burgers better, and it allows intelligence agencies to piece together disparate pieces of data into insights that might help them foil the next terrorist attack.

Big data early adopters were a hot topic March 12 at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s second annual Big Data Technology Symposium, as speakers briefed an audience of industry and federal executives on businesses and agencies already making use of big data.

Noteworthy private sector successes included:

• McDonald’s using vast amounts of operational data to automate the inspection of its burger buns, perfecting “proper seed distribution and color”
• Healthcare providers creating mobile applications for doctors that include patient genetics, family history, reference data with comparisons to similar patients; and
• Carpets that are sold with sensors that record senior citizens’ every movement and attempt to detect abnormalities that could signal a health issue.

Is healthcare finally ready for big data, analytics?

Healthcare organizations and providers are maturing in their ability to use clinical intelligence as a means to improve the care of patients, the business of providing care, and the process of reporting clinically-relevant medical information to public health agencies and other organizations charged with managing the health of whole populations. “The promise of meaningful use is that this data is going to be available for them to manage care, improve quality, and reduce cost,” says John McInally, former CIO and current Partner of Healthcare Big Data and Analytics Group CSC, in an interview. 

Improving organisational and national security with big data

There are three main areas that big data can affect and improve security and in the coming years big data will have a big impact on security issues worldwide and the way security is managed and handled. Some will be logical and others might be controversial, but big data will for sure impact the way we look at security.

1)Organisational security
Employees’ Security
Prevention of Fraudulent actions by customers
Prevention of organizations being hacked

2)Public Safety

3)National security

Big data investments ramp, says Gartner

Forty two percent of technology leaders are investing in big data projects or planning to spend within the next year, according to a Gartner survey.

The upshot is that 2013 will see big data pilots in 2012 go production. As those use cases proliferate by vertical, more companies will hop on the bandwagon.

Gartner noted that most companies are in the early stages of big data adoption. Many projects are revolving around revenue and business opportunities that can’t be solved via traditional data sources.

According to Gartner, 20 percent of global 100 companies will have a focus on information infrastructure comparable to application management.

Here are three ways that big-data analytics is changing tomorrow’s business.

1. Decisions Based on Facts
2. Unlocking the Value in Data
3. Business is a Game

The Future of Prediction: Predictive Analytics in 2020

Ten Predictions for the First Hour of 2020

Good morning. It’s January 2, 2020, the first workday of the year. As you drive to the office, the only thing predictive analytics doesn’t do for you is steer the car (yet that’s coming soon as well).

1.Anti-theft. As you enter your car, a predictive model establishes your identity based on several biometric readings, rendering it virtually impossible for an imposter to start the engine.
2.Entertainment. Pandora plays new music it predicts you will like.
3.Traffic. Your navigator pipes up and suggests alternative routing due to predicted traffic delays. Because the new route has hills and your car’s battery – its only energy source -is low, your maximum acceleration is decreased.
4.Breakfast. An en-route drive-through restaurant is suggested by a recommendation system that knows its daily food preference predictions must be accurate or you will disable it.
5.Social. Your Social Techretary offers to read you select Facebook feeds and Match.com responses it predicts will be of greatest interest. Inappropriate comments are accurately filtered out. CareerBuilder offers to read job postings to which you’re predicted to apply. When playing your voicemail, solicitations such as robo call messages are screened by predictive models just like email spam.
6.Deals. You accept your smartphone’s offer to read to you a text message from your wireless carrier. Apparently, they’ve predicted you’re going to switch to a competitor, because they are offering a huge discount on the iPhone 13.
7.Internet search. As it’s your colleague’s kid’s birthday, you query for a toy store that’s en route. Siri, available through your car’s audio, has been greatly improved better speech recognition and proficiently tailored interaction.
8.Driver inattention. Your seat vibrates as internal sensors predict your attention has wavered — perhaps you were distracted by a personalized billboard a bit too long.
9.Collision avoidance. A stronger vibration plus a warning sound alert you to a potential imminent collision — possibly with a child running toward the curb or another car threatening to run a red light.
10.Reliability. Your car says to you, “Please take me in for service soon, as I have predicted my transmission will fail within the next three weeks.”

Predictive analytics not only enhances your commute it was instrumental to making this drive possible in the first place:
•Car loan. You could afford this car only because a bank correctly scored you as a low credit risk and approved your car loan.
•Insurance. Sensors you volunteered to have installed in your car transmit driving behavior readings to your auto insurance company, which in turn plugs them into a predictive model in order to continually adjust your premium. Your participation in this program will reduce your payment by $30 this month.
•Wireless reliability. The wireless carrier that serves to connect to your phone, as well as your car has built out its robust infrastructure according to demand prediction.
•Cyber-security. Unbeknownst to you, your car and phone avert crippling virus attacks by way of analytical detection.
•Road safety. Impending hazards such as large potholes and bridge failures have been efficiently discovered and preempted by government systems that predictively target inspections.
•No reckless drivers. Dangerous repeat moving violation offenders have been scored as such by a predictive model to help determine how long their licenses should be suspended.
•Your health. Predictive models helped determine the medical treatments you have previously received, leaving you healthier today.

During the racing season roughly March through November teams travel to 19 countries. Like all the teams, the Sauber F1 Team heavily relies upon data analytics to constantly innovate its car design and racing strategies.

During a typical race weekend, about 25 GB of telemetry gets collected in total. Every year, some 20 TB of data are collected, stored, and analyzed.

Manufacturers Are Diving Into Big Data

Industrial companies of all sizes are confronting massive volumes of data financial transactions, logistics stats, RFID and bar-code data, images, web analytics, social media streams, machine data, sensor readouts all streaming in at high velocity and in a dizzying variety of formats. The “big data” concept has emerged in recent years as an important new decision-making tool for manufacturers.

Data visualization: New tools for illustration, insight and inspiration

The emerging field of “data visualization” brings together quantitative information with technology and graphic design to tell stories and convey ideas. As data about our environment, travel, work, online activities and other behavior increases exponentially, visualization tools can help discern the forest from the trees of rows and columns, in order to understand trends and make decisions. Moving beyond the standard pie charts and bar graphs, creative visual artists, demographers, journalists and others are developing exciting new ways to marry data with visual representation.

8 Ways Big Data Will Change Our Lives

Spot-On Sports Analysis
Advanced Healthcare
Personalized Advertisements
Easier Commutes
Presidential Campaigns
Cars Of The Future
Improved Customer Service
Customized Education

CIOs will increasingly draw on BI, analytics outsourcing firms to help deliver timely business insights to users, says U.K. technology research firm.

In 2013, we will see a steep rise in outsourced data analytics services as CIOs seek help in providing timely, decision-supporting insights to business users.

This is the conclusion of U.K.-based technology market research firm Pringle & Company in an extensive new report, “Business Intelligence Software & Services Market, 2012-2016.”

The research, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2012, suggests that the market for services provided by business and technology consultancies to develop and implement the systems required to generate data insights, is growing at a compound annual rate of more than 15%. The global market for these services will almost double over the next four years, from an estimated $54.5 billion in 2012 to $96.9 billion in 2016, according to the Pringle & Company report.

The overall business intelligence and analytics market, made up of both software and services, was worth $79 billion in 2012, and will now grow at a rate of  approximately 16% annually to reach $143.3 billion in 2016.

5 Ways Big Data Will Change Lives In 2013

1.How we spend
2.How we vote
3.How we study
4.How we stay healthy
5.How we keep (or lose) our privacy

Competing on Analytics

We all know the power of the killer app. Over the years, groundbreaking systems from companies such as American Airlines (electronic reservations), Otis Elevator (predictive maintenance), and American Hospital Supply (online ordering) have dramatically boosted their creators’ revenues and reputations. These heralded and coveted applications amassed and applied data in ways that upended customer expectations and optimized operations to unprecedented degrees. They transformed technology from a supporting tool into a strategic weapon.

Companies questing for killer apps generally focus all their firepower on the one area that promises to create the greatest competitive advantage. But a new breed of company is upping the stakes. Organizations such as Amazon, Harrah’s, Capital One, and the Boston Red Sox have dominated their fields by deploying industrial-strength analytics across a wide variety of activities. In essence, they are transforming their organizations into armies of killer apps and crunching their way to victory.

Big data analytics will be more streamlined in 2013

There are a number of technologies and trends expected to impact the IT landscape in 2013, especially the use of big data analytics. Companies that can manage and study the information in their systems can benefit from offering customers more personalized advertising or identifying trends to help the corporate decision-making process.

Virtualization Review’s Elias Khnaser recently predicted what he expects will take place this year regarding the evolution of big data. Although large companies with vast resources are often at the forefront of technological innovation, smaller businesses can also take full advantage.

“I’m a huge believer in big data analytics – it will change the world and the way we do things,” Khnaser wrote. “I think 2013 will amplify the tools and capabilities to use big data analytics in an easier and more streamlined approach, where small and large business will be able to benefit from it.”

Although it is apparent that big data is helpful for companies of all sizes, large firms especially believe that the IT trend is crucial for future success.

It is unlikely that Gramener, Anaxee and Stelling are companies that most people would have even heard about, but these and others like them could represent the new frontiers of India’s software industry.

Over more than two decades, India earned a reputation as the global leader in software outsourcing, but product companies perceived as the mark of a true technology powerhouse have been few and far between. With Gramener and technology product companies of its ilk coming up in large numbers across India, that anomaly is on its way to being set right.

From helping capture fingerprint and iris data for the Aadhaar card to crunching numbers so that chicken live healthier and longer, these companies are using cutting-edge technology to provide tailor-made solutions for Indian needs.

Selling innovative solutions for specific problems

The company that helps enhance longevity for chickens is Gramener, founded by former executives for IBM, Deloitte and Accenture, and based in Hyderabad. It does so by analysing data provided by Suguna Foods, its client and one of the biggest in the poultry business. Gramener finds disease patterns to let Suguna know what precautions to take and even makes recommendations about how much sunlight the birds must be exposed to, the type of feed, and even the structure of the shed in which they are housed.

Suguna, whose sales top 4,200 crore, has deployed an enterprise information technology system from one of the world’s largest software makers but it turned to the two-year-old Gramener to find answers to specific problems.

“Gramener’s business intelligence helps us take the right decisions at right time and we also get value for money,” said GB Sundararajan, the managing director of Coimbatore-based Suguna.

Stronger data bank and data analytic skills will help health insurance companies in better underwriting of insurance policies, which includes understanding risk profiles and product pricing. Strong data bank will also ensure bringing down fraud in the system. Health insurance companies are working together to strengthen data analytic capabilities, said a FICCI report.

“From collecting internal data independently, insurers are now slowly moving towards data sharing on a collaborative basis. However, with the increase in the number of competitors, there is a need for insurers to think out of the box and make a gradual shift towards more advanced techniques in data analytics that can help take the Indian insurance business profitably into the future,” said FICCI.

The Effect of Predictive Analytics on the Homeowners’ Industry

Insurance executives are still grappling with an all-too-slowly recovering economy, declining returns on equity and increasing pressure to turn a profit any way they can and carriers offering Homeowners’ coverage face added volatility in light of recent catastrophic weather events like Superstorm Sandy.

In order to bring some balance to this equation, there is a growing need to better understand and manage risk in Homeowners’ insurance.

The numbers tell the story: According to A.M. Best and the Insurance Information Institute, Homeowners’ combined ratio swung from a high of 158.4 percent in 1992 to a low of 88.9 percent in 2006. The average combined ratio for Homeowners’ carriers from 2008-2011 is 113 percent, compared to 102 percent across all other P&C lines.

BIG DATA PREDICTIONS FOR 2013

Firms have taken to big data. Here are  Mike Gualtieri’s four predictions for key enterprise big data themes in 2013:

• Firms will realize that “big data” means all of their data.
• The algorithm wars will begin.
• Real-time architectures will swing to prominence.
• Naysayers will fall silent.

 India aims for world’s big data

Growing demand for big data skills will see companies looking to outsourcing to plug the gap, presenting opportunities for India. But, it must first address several fundamental challenges.

In its report “Big data: The next big thing”, Indian IT services industry group Nasscom expects the country’s big data industry to grow from US$200 million in 2012 to US$1 billion in 2015. The biggest challenge and opportunity is to satisfy the demand for data scientists. Avendus Capital, for one, estimates the United States will suffer a shortage of up to 200,000 data scientists by 2018, a gap that will most likely be filled by outsourcing.

Healthcare IT: The 4 Pillars Of Technical Innovation

Four major technology trends, which are becoming more intertwined every day, will dominate the healthcare IT landscape in 2013, according to IDC Health Insights’ top researcher, Scott Lundstrom.

These trends social media, cloud, big data and analytics, and mobility already are having a big impact on many healthcare provider and payer organizations, but CIOs will be faced with managing and deploying many of these technologies as their use becomes pervasive during the coming year. Lundstrom calls these tech trends the “four pillars” of healthcare IT and recently presented them during a keynote presentation at UBM Technology’sHealthcare IT Summit.

“By using technology we can go out and make a difference in the quality and cost of care,” Lundstrom told the CIOs gathered at the conference. “The answer to doing more with less in healthcare is getting closer to the patient with cloud, analytics, mobile, and social/unified communications.”

Big Data Analytics: Not Just for Big Business Anymore

So much data and so little business intelligence. That’s the irony of the information age, which is adding another 2.5 quintillion bytes to the data universe each day. Companies can either get buried by this avalanche of big data or use technology tools to mine its riches. This ability to access and analyze endless sources and types of structured and unstructured data such as social media chatter, commercial transactions, financial market data, GPS trails, genomics is revolutionizing marketing and transforming entire industries.

Because of its scope, big data has largely been the province of big businesses with big data centers. Large corporations have invested armies of data specialists and fantastic sums of money in big data. Those that harness big data can make highly data-driven business decisions, and respond and adapt to changing market conditions more quickly than their competitors. Marketing departments and ad agencies use big data to target customers with increasing granularity and accuracy.

Predictive analytics for performance management, the time is now

A long list of suppliers are flogging the concept of predictive analytics, that is the use of machine intelligence to sift through the massive, ever growing amount of log data operational systems generate, to predict problems before they occur so they can be resolved before the IT house of cards falls down. Is this a tool organizations can rely on or just the most recent catch phrase.

Katyayan Gupta, Analyst and Connectivity Lead, Telecom and Networking services, APAC & Emerging Markets, Forrester Research reminisces how the focus of service providers evolved over the last couple of years.

“The operators today are focusing a lot more on the customers who are on-board, reaching out to them proactively, and providing Value Added Services (VAS). This is the story of Indian Operators 2.0, which is all about VAS and enabling intelligent services to customers,” he says. Some of the key technologies that the telecom vertical has been investing in include business intelligence and analytics, Big Data, predictive analytics, Operations Support System (OSS), Business Support System (BSS), customer experience management, social media, multi-channel integration of CRM, and technologies to tap into the enterprise market.

Forrester’s Gupta says, “Predictive Analytics will become very important in the future. This solution would enable predicting the behaviour patterns of specific users, enabling the operators to provide personalized solutions for individual customers depending on their specific usage patterns.

Big data market to grow more than 2 times by 2014

Banks, insurance companies, employers, retailers, marketing agencies, political candidates, and more are using predictive analytics to gain valuable, yet potentially worrisome insights into people’s lives, such as when we’ll get pregnant, whether or not we’ll take our medicine, how we’ll vote, and even where we’ll be 24 hours from now. Driven by advanced alogarithms and a seemingly endless supply of data provided by electronic financial transactions, Internet activity, and cell phone habits, researchers are able to garner a pretty good understanding of what makes people tick.

Big data market is expected to grow more than two-fold to USD 153.1 million (around Rs 840 crore) by 2014, over the last year, on the back of huge growth in volumes and diversity of data, a survey has said.

According to IDC, big data market is likely to reach USD 153.1 million in 2014. Huge growth in volumes and diversity in data are the factors leading to the adoption of big data technology among businesses, the survey by IDC-EMC said.

Data analytics driving marketing campaigns: Visa 

Digital technology is transforming the marketing functions. This edition of Story Board understands how Visa- the electronic payment service provider functions. Visa has been active in India for 30 years now and has worked to popularize the use of credit and debit cards in an environment where 97 percent of financial transactions are in cash.

Visa’s marketing director for India and South Asia, Shubhranshu Singh explains how B2B business data analytics are used to decode consumer trends and to create ad campaigns and to power all aspects of marketing.

The article contains edited transcript of Singh’s interview to CNBC-TV18.

There’s No Panacea for the Big Data Talent Gap

The survey of C-suite and executive function heads with responsibility for Big Data initiatives revealed that 85% of the organizations surveyed had funded Big Data initiatives underway or in the planning stage. The interest and commitment is real. What is less certain is how these same organizations plan to support these initiatives from a business and talent perspective.

Organizations expressed serious reservations about the talent and organizational alignment issues that we see as a critical element in enabling organizations to derive value and achieve success from their Big Data investments. While Big Data   holds the promise of greater speed, flexibility, and the ability to unlock new insights from large and diverse sources of data, it has also raised expectations, causing some organizations to caution about what can be realistically achieved in the immediate term.

Big data will transform the way businesses develop the talent in their workforce   over the next five years, according to analysts. Data analytics has the potential to help businesses make dramatic returns by managing their workforce more effectively, said human resources (HR) technology analyst Josh Bersin.

“This is the next big thing that is going to happen in HR,” he told delegates at the HR Tech Europe conference. Data analytics technologies have the potential to  offer businesses insights into their employees that could have a real impact on company profits, the HR conference heard.

One insurance company, for example, had a policy of only hiring graduates from top schools, in the belief that this would help it maximise profits from the sales team.

Big Data Can Mean Big Bucks for Small Business

Trends and numbers are always around us, but for many business owners vital information often goes unnoticed because most professionals simply don’t know how to fully use the data they have. Business intelligence is a relatively new field which allows businesses to collect, maintain, and organize knowledge pertaining to virtually any field imaginable. Samples of data commonly collected by businesses are: browsing history, purchasing history of customers, statistics on website visitor activity on websites, and pretty much anything where data can be logged and tallied. Although some types of tracking raise ethical concerns, there are many cases where business intelligence is legitimately applied.

Applying Data Analytics to Customer Interactions

Identifying the available types of data is one thing. Applying it in real time to drive outcomes is another. Companies must apply a simple yet powerful, three-step framework to describe the philosophy behind this application of data analytics to customer interactions.

Big Data Analytics – A Disruptive Technology !!

Most of the companies now have realized that there is a huge competitive advantage in analyzing the humongous data quickly &effectively for future insights.

Big data analytics is the disruptive technology bringing the 4th aspect of Value to the already published TDWI’s 3Vs – Volume, Velocity &Variety.

• It enables business users to process every granular bit of data in quicker way removing the traditional need for sampling & then applying the models
• It encourages an investigative approach in users for data analysis since they get access to whole data
• It can reveal insights hidden in the data, which were previously too costly due to large data movements
• As per Gartner report, Big data is priority of SMB & it will drive $232 billion in spending through 2016.

ways big data is helping reinvent enterprise security

What’s true in the rest of the world is true for security software, as well: more data means more intelligence. Thanks to the emergence of new techniques for storing, collecting and analyzing data, there’s a new wave of security companies looking smarter than ever.

The advent of big data hasn’t changed the ideas behind most enterprise security practices, but it has made them better. While network security and endpoint security have always relied on the processing of files or traffic against threat databases to determine whether they’re dangerous, big data lets them gather, store and analyze much more data. The result, in theory, are products that are more intelligent than their predecessors and that make the guys tasked with keeping a company secure that are much better at their jobs.

Here are seven big data-inspired approaches to security :

Prioritizing threats
Letting admins play C.S.I
Stopping crime in its tracks
Visualizing threats
Keeping BYOD in check
Opening the data — lots of it
Playing petri dish

BigData in HR: Why it’s Here and What it Means

The talk about BigData is getting louder by the minute. As companies shift their core systems to the cloud, more and more people-related data becomes available. This, coupled with the tremendous focus on BigData in the technology sector, has created a huge focus on data driven decision-making.

Why Analytics is Coming to HR?

If you think about the history of analytics in other business areas, the evolution looks like the chart below. When companies started industrializing their manufacturing, they eventually purchased ERP software and developed supply chain and financial analytics.

Using Data Visualizations for Content Marketing

When it comes to content marketing, nothing compares to a stunning data visualization. For one thing, an attractive image catches the viewer’s eye and gives the rest of your content a second or two to sink in. In the highly competitive environment of the 21st century Internet, that second or two can be critical.

Big Data Can Mean Big Returns in Retail

Big data for retail means a chance to see why a sale didn’t occur. Is it product selection? Pricing? Store display? Ineffective promotional material?

Before, this information was hard to track, but with the advent of big data and in-memory computing, two products ideally suited to collecting and analyzing unstructured data types like that of retail, are poised to play a significant role in sales.

]]> http://blog.gramener.com/883/data-science-news-14/feed 0 http://blog.gramener.com/883/data-science-news-14?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=data-science-news-14 http://feeds.gramener.com/~r/gramener-blog/~3/-F7_LVgSDnA/data-science-news-13 http://blog.gramener.com/870/data-science-news-13#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2012 12:14:38 +0000 Gramener PR http://blog.gramener.com/?p=870 Continue reading →]]> India set to be data analytics hotbed 

India is well-positioned to be a global center for data analytics because of the huge number of IT graduates entering the labor market every year, said Andrew Milroy, vice president of Asia-Pacific ICT practice at Frost & Sullivan.

Data analytics is not new to the country’s IT scene, said Milroy, but the importance of utilizing such technology is only now growing worldwide as companies look to make sense of the deluge of data, particularly unstructured data. The insights gleaned then go into improving companies’ business agility, customer relationships and market predictions, he said.

Gartner: Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 

Delegates to the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Florida this week got a preview of the analyst firm’s “Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013″ presentation, with Gartner’s David Cearley saying “Consumerisation is the backdrop of the forces of much of these changes.”

From Cearley’s presentation, these are the top 10 strategic tech trends for 2013:

Mobile device battles
Consumerization
Mobile apps and HTML5
Personal cloud
The Internet of things
Hybrid IT and cloud computing
Strategic big data 
Actionable analytics 
Mainstream in-memory computing
Integrated ecosystems

ART OF PERFORMANCE: FAMOUS SPORTS MOMENTS GRAPHED 

The images you see here represent some of the best moments in sports history, while at the same time representing some of the best data visualization seen in a while. Not only do these graphics clearly and cleanly demonstrate the massive talent of the competitors in each varied sport, each also does it with a stylish and appropriate display for the data involved. For the information obsessed, these graphics truly prove that data can be beautiful.

Big data could transform staff management 

Big data will transform the way businesses develop the talent in their workforce over the next five years, according to analysts. Data analytics has the potential to help businesses make dramatic returns by managing their workforce more effectively, said human resources (HR) technology analyst Josh Bersin.

“This is the next big thing that is going to happen in HR,” he told delegates at the HR Tech Europe conference. Data analytics technologies have the potential to offer businesses insights into their employees that could have a real impact on company profits, the HR conference heard.

One insurance company, for example, had a policy of only hiring graduates from top schools, in the belief that this would help it maximize profits from the sales team.

Data analytics helped Obama win, says Mostashari (MD National Coordinator for health IT)   

Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national health IT coordinator, said that data and analytics played a critical role in the campaign and re-election of President Barack Obama – mirroring the growing importance of data in healthcare.

Data and analytics have transformed marketing, campaigning, and even baseball. “How is it possible for us to imagine a world where that power of data is not brought to bear on life and death, clinical care, on population health, and affirming the path that we are on with health IT and bringing data to life?” Mostashari said the morning  after the election at the Nov. 7 meeting of the federal advisory Health IT Policy Committee.

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Providing access to a data set only goes halfway in delivering transparency; infographics and data visualizations are the second phase of open government, according to one Internal Revenue Service official.

“We’re trying to redefine what we mean by data user,” said Wayne Kei, chief of communications and data dissemination at the IRS’s statistics of income division.

Traditionally, SOI data is used by technical experts at the Treasury Department’s office of tax analysis, the Commerce Department’s bureau of economic analysis and the Joint Committee on Taxation, said Kei during an Oct.9 webinar hosted by the General Services Administration’s DigitalGov University.

But the Open Government Directive requires agencies to take their data a step further–beyond the users who can easily make heads and tails of tax data, he said.

“By providing our data in a more engaging way, we can get people more interested,” said Kei. “They can see the value of our statistics and become more educated on what we do at the IRS.”

Engaging with a broader audience is also easier than ever, he said. Through social media IRS is able to interact directly with customers. Social media platforms such as Tumblr and Facebook are well suited for posting and sharing infographics and data visualizations.

Big data to create 1.9M IT jobs in U.S. by 2015, says Gartner

There were a lot of reasons for Gartner researchers to give a gloomy economic outlook at its Symposium/ITxpo conference , especially after the latest round of quarterly reports from Intel, IBM and others. But the picture painted by Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s head of research, was upbeat in a surprising way.

Gartner isn’t revising its global IT growth forecast significantly, which remains down from the initial expectations for this year. But Garter’s relatively flat revenue forecast isn’t being carried over to jobs, at least in one sector of IT: big data.

Big data, which refers to data collected and analyzed from every imaginable source, is becoming an engine of job creation as businesses discover ways to turn data into revenue, says Gartner. By 2015, it is expected to create 4.4 million IT jobs globally, of which 1.9 million will be in the U.S.

Big data could transform staff management 

Big data will transform the way businesses develop the talent in their workforce over the next five years, according to analysts.

Data analytics has the potential to help businesses make dramatic returns by managing their workforce more effectively, said human resources (HR) technology analyst Josh Bersin.

“This is the next big thing that is going to happen in HR,” he told delegates at the HR Tech Europe conference.

Data analytics technologies have the potential to offer businesses insights into their employees that could have a real impact on company profits, the HR conference heard.

No entity produces, gathers and stores more data than the American government. So the challenges and opportunities of so-called Big Data loom large for the many agencies and departments of the United States government.

The Obama administration acknowledged that reality last spring when it announced a major research initiative in Big Data computing in government, with funding commitments that totaled $200 million.

Research is one step, but to really harness the Big Data opportunity there needs to be a proliferation of useful projects across government. The goal, of course, is to find insights and make better decisions using data from traditional databases as well as from the fast-growing new sources of digital data, including the Web, biological and industrial sensors, video, e-mail and social network communications.

A road map for rolling out Big Data projects in government is being released on Wednesday, “Demystifying Big Data: A Practical Guide to Transforming the Business of Government.” The report was produced by the TechAmerica Foundation, a nonprofit education organization, in consultation with technology experts in the White House, Internal Revenue Service, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and other agencies.

Electing Big Data: How federal Agencies can benefit from Analytics skills

For the government specifically, the inability to capture, sift through, and analyze the growing amount and variety of data can prove hugely detrimental, as data handling will be crucial to solving our country’s challenges. In addition, it will help our government spur innovation, strengthening our economy through technological advancements in business and society.

As explained in a recent opinion piece for The Hill by IBM Senior Vice President and Big Data Commission Co-Chair, Steve Mills, government officials who are armed with Big Data will be better able to address current issues, predict future ones, and have the insight to make more informed decisions on behalf of the American people.

As businesses, government and universities embrace new training and instruction we will see the true potential of Big Data and the impact it will have in the world.

What big data means for small business 

Almost 50% of CIOs surveyed said that they thought big data and business intelligence would be a top disruptive trend in 2013. However, much of the innovation and use of big data has traditionally neglected small businesses. Standard business intelligence (BI) tooling for accessing big data has been expensive, reliant on IT integration, and often required people trained in data analytics. However, over the last two years we’ve seen the rise of new cloud-based BI tools that focus on ease-of-use and lower cost. In addition, these tools provide built-in analysis that makes it easier for small businesses to utilize BI software and understand what big data means to them.

When Pirates Meet Advanced Analytics 

Crime fighters are learning to anticipate criminal behavior by finding important “clues” hidden in millions of pieces of disparate data. One fascinating example of this trend is the work that maritime professionals are doing to stop piracy.

They’re already good at analyzing structured data from previous incidents and real-time oceanographic conditions and they’re definitely seeing some results. The latest statistics from the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) show a 54% drop in reported incidents during the first half of 2012 as compared to the same period in 2011, some of which is certainly attributable to improved analytics.

Predictive Analytics on the Rise in Insurance Industry: Survey

According to a recent survey, the use of predictive analytics is on the rise in the insurance industry.

Insurance providers are increasingly interested in data or analytics solutions to help manage producers and improve their performance, according to a recent survey.

Trilogy Insurance & Financial Services partnered withInsurance Networking News to survey more than 100 insurance industry professionals on the current state of predictive analytics in the insurance sector. According to the research findings, insurance providers have made investments in analytics tools over the year but are just beginning to realize the significance of technology to help manage provider performance.

The top three benefits of insurance companies’ current data and analytics solutions  are customer segmentation, improving the competitive advantage of insurance carriers and retaining existing insurance customers.

The global spike in protests, tracked in social media and visualized

Protests are rising worldwide, according to this visualization produced by the intelligence analysis contractor firm Recorded Future. Their metric records “intensity” of references to protests in online media and social media, with red signifying heavy discussion of protests and blue for little or no discussion.

You can play with the chart here, but the above iteration displays data from all countries over the past year. The countries are ordered by intensity, with the most protest-saturated at the bottom and the least at top. (The graph is too small to fit all country names, so it displays the name of every fifth or so.)

The metric is not perfect, and not all protests are comparable. China experiences about 500 protests every day, yet its protests tend to be small and largely peaceful, whereas Syria’s far fewer “protests” can involve heavy artillery. “We are weighting by the amount of coverage, so if the more peaceful protests get less coverage on the Web, the numbers will be lower,” a Recorded Future designer responded when I asked about this.

The growing volume and complexity of data that companies are collating and analyzing, as well as the empowering of more business end-users to access such insights, have raised the importance of intuitive data visualization interfaces for analytics tools, say industry watchers.

John Brand, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, said there is now more general users without technical know-how handling data analytics than in the past, when such tools were limited to the tech department.

At the same time, the relationship between different data sets has gotten more complex, Brand noted. Traditional data visualization approaches were simplistic in representing the correlation such as through rows and columns on Excel spreadsheets.

Today, though, there is a greater emphasis on integrating data from a wide variety of sources, so new methods of visualizations such as infographics, interactive bubble charts and 3D landscapes are increasingly needed, he pointed out.

As more business end-users get access to analytics tools, the way data is presented will need to enable “cognitive” visualization in order for them to better make sense of the insights.

Who’s Really Using Big Data

According to Harvard Business Review,Big Data clearly has the attention of the C-suite and responding executives were very optimistic for the most part. Eighty-five percent expected to gain substantial business and IT benefits from Big Data initiatives. When asked what they thought the major benefits would be, they named improvements in “fact-based decision making” and “customer experience” as #1 and #2. Many of the initiatives they had in mind were still in the early stages, so HBR weren’t hearing about actual business results, for the most part, but rather about plans and expectations:

• 85% of organizations reported that they have Big Data initiatives planned or in progress.
• 70% report that these initiatives are enterprise-driven.
• 85% of the initiatives are sponsored by a C-level executive or the head of a line of business.
• 75% expect an impact across multiple lines of business.
• 80% believe that initiatives will cross multiple lines of business or functions.

Data Analytics: The next big thing in Indian IT

Here’s the next big thing in India’s IT space firms that can be global champs in crunching huge volumes of commercially useful data for companies. Think about it: copious amount of data is being generated on social media forums such as Twitter and Facebook.

How can a company get the nugget of gold from this data mine, called Big Data in trade jargon? That’s the job of data analytics firms, where India is expected to play a dominant role.

Big Data Analytics a Big Benefit for Marketing Departments

Today’s marketing departments face many challenges. Organizations are still identifying methods to make their products more customer- and market-driven, while businesses are pressured to drive more qualified leads to their sales teams and to work with product development to ensure they’re delivering the products and services clients are asking for.

Some have identified marketing analytics as a way to resolve these challenges. A recent survey directed by Professor Christine Moorman and Sr. Professor of Business Administration T. Austin Finch with Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, found that marketing executives in the Fortune 1000 and Forbes 200 plan to increase their spending on marketing analytics in the next three years, some by as much as 60 percent. Many will be starting from scratch, as only 35 percent of respondents currently use marketing analytics.

Marketing analytics used in conjunction with big data will help many organizations properly evaluate their marketing performance, gain insight into their clients’ purchasing habits, market trends and needs and make evidence-based marketing decisions. As one example, look at how politicians are using big data to identify their target audience and reach out to the so-called “silent majority.”

Big Data Analytics the Ultimate Solution for HR Woes?

With a tough global economy, and high unemployment rates, employers are literally deluged with stacks and stacks of resumes. That’s where Big Data analytics comes into play. Machines are increasingly reading and scoring applicants for call-backs and interviews. And personality tests are chock full of data, which are then used to predict the suitability of candidates for a specific job based on how they answer a battery of questions.

Supply chain execs see benefits in predictive software

Seventy-five percent of the 191 top supply chain officers who took part in a June 2012 Aberdeen Group survey said their decision making could be improved with the use of proper analytics, defined as special software tools built to discern patterns or trends in supply chain and logistics operations. Aberdeen Senior Research Analyst Bob Heaney detailed the survey results in a presentation at Dematic’s 27th Annual Material Handling and Logistics Conference in Park City, Utah, where more than 400 people gathered in early September to hear presentations on the latest supply chain and material handling developments and trends.

Respondents to the research firm’s survey said predictive analytical software would help them to achieve cost savings, increase profitability, and differentiate their customer service from that of competitors.

44 percent of the survey respondents are currently using analytics to improve internal processes for forecasting, pricing, and planning promotions as well as for making mid-course corrections. In addition, 37 percent said they are using analytics to optimize inventory based on predictive analytics for customer demand or service levels. Another 35 percent are using analytics to “transform” their supply chains.

The Big Value In Big Data: Seeing Customer Buying Patterns 

A real world example of how leveraging Big Data can solve the complexity around product proliferation by helping companies align product offering and supply chain based on customer-buying patterns.

Big Data: More Than Just A Trend

According to Gartner, unstructured and structured data held by enterprises continues to grow at explosive rates. However, volume and velocity of data – what the business world is beginning to understand as the “Big Data Problem” – are becoming less of an issue than the variety of data. Each silo within the enterprise – operations, supply management, sales, marketing – faces its own data variety challenges, where bits exist in a multitude of formats and types.

Due to the variability of data across silos, systems can’t “speak” to one another, and gaining an accurate, enterprise-wide view of demand and performance seems impossible. In fact, most business and IT managers accept the lack of inter-system collaboration as a given, an inevitable limit that must be worked around.

There is a better way to tackle this challenge in variety and capture the opportunity posed by Big Data.

Patterns And Connections

This Big Data challenge requires solutions that can harness the intelligence from the data and deliver actionable intelligence to the business user. Conventional business intelligence and data warehouse tools aren’t designed to analyze, identify and surface critical data linkages and causality.

Freeing the data to reveal connections and causation through pattern-based analytics solutions will paint a bigger picture – one that can better manage product variants and streamline sales by shedding light on what customers are buying, when, where and how. Currently companies pour their non-standard data into spreadsheets that then require teams of data analysts to interpret and derive meaning from it. This is not scalable and often misses the mark. Big data demands applications that can interpret and deliver immediate actionable intelligence to business users.

Firms are realizing the importance of visualization tools because employees are unable to pick out important patterns in data without data visualization. Forrester points out that “numbers on a grid often does not convey the whole story and in the worst case, it can even lead to a wrong conclusion.” Ever tried to cram a bunch of data on a single screen in the hopes that it will be easier to read? You can only fit so much. Visualizations help cure that problem. How about data overload? You know, rows and rows of excel columns; it can get pretty daunting and quite frankly difficult to analyze. “Fitting in and analyzing hundreds of thousands of columns of attributes is an enormous challenge.”

We’re seeing the development of new data visualization techniques, what Forrester  is referring to as Advanced Data Visualization (ADV).

Is the BI Market Opportunity Understated?

According to Gartner, Business Intelligence (BI) was the second-fastest growing enterprise software market in 2011, with 16.4 percent year-over-year sales growth (from $10.5 billion to $12.2 billion). IDC projects the business analytics software software market will reach $33.9 billion in 2012.

But are market sizing projections understated? Potentially missing from growth forecasts is that the end-user base for BI tools is exploding, from a relatively exclusive group of IT professionals and data scientists to a market of millions of everyday business users. The reason: BI tools are becoming easier to use, making them accessible to the masses. In short, BI tools are becoming consumerized.

“In the future, analytics and caring about data will become a part of everyone’s job,”  says Caleb Poterbin, head of marketing at analytics software provider Chartio.

Local Governments: Ready for Big Data?

Alistair Croll (principal analyst at Bitcurrent) singled out recently the public sector or what he called “civil engineering” as one of three spaces to watch for a big data impact. Said Croll: “I think municipal data is one of the big three for several reasons: it’s a good tie breaker for partisanship, we have new interfaces everyone can understand, and we finally have a mostly-connected citizenry.”

For the federal level, Mark Weber issued a reality check: “As is the case with most emerging technologies, rhetoric often outpaces adoption. A recent survey of more than 150 federal IT professionals conducted by Meritalk on behalf of NetApp highlights enthusiasm within the federal government to leverage big data to support government mission outcomes.‘The Big Data Gap’ survey reveals that just 60 percent of IT professionals say their agency is analyzing the data it collects and a modest 40 percent are using data to make strategic decisions. All of this despite the fact that a whopping 96 percent of those surveyed expect their agency’s stored data to grow in the next two years by an average of 64%.”

There are of course some initial success stories, for example the use of big data to assist law enforcement agencies in fighting crime. But before we see the promised potential realized, a solid IT foundation has to be built and the specific questions big data could answer or the optimal government sector activities it can improve must be defined.

Patching the Leaky Sales Pipeline with Data Analytics

Insurers employing outbound marketing programs must effectively manage lead generation costs to successfully maintain consistent profitability. In the past, insurance companies utilizing outbound lead generation and customer management programs often found themselves lacking the level of real-time data required to strategically determine the next steps for their business. Sales should flow around real-time data analytics based on conversion rates by product, representative, source, day and time as well as team and individual agent execution. To answer that need, insurance companies should implement an analytical system to create the actionable intelligence that can increase lead conversion.

Today, insurance companies can arm their sales team with conversion and agent performance statistics that can increase the speed and success of the entire sales pipeline. Implementing data analytics software could be the glue needed to ensure that no stellar sales leads fall through the cracks.

Changing the World: Big Data and the Cloud

We are in an age when jobs like “data scientist” are not far from reality. The convergence of two key technological areas cloud computing and big data are having far reaching implications that indeed are changing the world.

It’s leading to the discovery of new drugs to cure diseases; predicting weather patterns more accurately (even predicting earthquakes?), finding better ways to use and save water, and so on. These are many of the ideas and projects that IBM has advanced with its Smarter Planet initiative, which has cloud computing and big data technologies at its core.

The Cloud computing model is a perfect match for big data since cloud computing provides unlimited resources on demand. Just two years ago I was delivering presentations to introduce professionals and students to this new model. Today, cloud is a given, most IT people understand what it is, and many are using it in their jobs.

Satyamev Jayate, one of India’s highest-rated television shows, is using data as a means to effect meaningful change. The show’s producers are aggregating and analyzing the millions of messages they receive on controversial issues to do everything from planning future episodes to pushing for political change.

Data Science in India: meeting requirements, not just budgets

By Andrew Brust (Contributor at ZDNet)

It struck me that educational values and approaches in India might make Data Science skill sets there more abundant than in the U.S. and other developed countries. Perhaps Data Science will help India transcend the stigma/typecast of a tech talent center that is merely lower in cost.

India’s education culture is benefiting Data Science, and the country is producing Data Analytics professionals that compete not just on relative cost, but on absolute talent.

From the hub of the IT services sector, the shift is now toward making India an engine for knowledge-based services, with Data Analytics foremost among them.

Data decoded 

Data, especially Big Data, is key to decision making and companies worldwide are starting to value this in their business. However, the mere volume of data is not the issue that organizations face today. It is the unstructured nature of the data and the challenge in extracting business value from it that is beyond the reach of traditional enterprise tools and business practices. According to a McKinsey study , the US alone faces a deficit of 140,000-190,000 data scientists against a projected demand of 440,000-490,000 by 2018. A shortage of the analytical and managerial talent necessary to make the most of Big Data is a significant and pressing challenge and one that companies need to address. Keeping this in mind, many Fortune 500 firms have already started to leverage India and its Data Science professionals to competitive advantage.

Destination, not detour 

While many US firms were initially hesitant to work with an offshore provider, sourcing to India is no longer a taboo. But some are still skeptical about shifting work geographically for lower costs. For Data Science, India is not simply a cheaper  alternative; it’s a go-to market for talent that can’t be found elsewhere.

Data Science and Big Data may mark a turning point for India and, most likely, other countries where mathematics education is heavily emphasized. Ultimately, markets that stress education in addition to technology innovation will be well- positioned. India’s proving that today.

How Big Data Startups Could Kill A $30 Billion Industry 

When it comes to big data, “size doesn’t matter,” Ravi Mhatre, managing director of venture firm LightspeedVenture Partners just told Business Insider.

“It’s not just big data. It’s got to be fast data and it’s got to be meaningful data” he says.

There’s a new wave of start ups trying to make it easier to use big data systems. If they succeed, they will really hurt the multi-billion dollar market for business- intelligence software and threaten products like SAP’s Business Objects, IBMCognos and Oracle Hyperion.

“We’re talking an industry today that’s probably $20 [billion] to $30 billion that I think, overnight, is going to be replaced by a completely new set of platforms,” he predicts.

Future of data analytics is predictive, actionable

Move over, retrospective data analysis – the future is in real-time and predictive analytics, says a new market report from Frost & Sullivan. The trend is also toward web-based systems that aggregate disparate data across diverse care settings.

The more “holistic” approach to data mining includes clinical data from electronic health records combined with financial and administrative information to provide a more well-rounded view of the quality and efficiency of patient care and then using that information to make strategic decisions, according to a Frost & Sullivan announcement.

The firm predicts that the use of advanced health data analytics solutions in hospitals will grow significantly to 50 percent adoption in 2016 up from about 10 percent last year. That’s a 37.9 percent compound annual growth rate and an increase of 400 percent over the baseline.

“Hospitals will increasingly invest in advanced data analytics solutions to monitor end-to-end care delivery across a variety of settings,” Frost & Sullivan analyst Nancy Fabozzi said. “Due to growing competitive pressures, hospitals need to provide comprehensive reporting on performance and quality measures to a variety of stakeholders. Advanced analytics capabilities are absolutely critical for survival there is no way to avoid it.”

Customer Analytics: Social and Predictive Gains a Few Years Off

In a Forrester survey of 90 enterprises customer analytics practitioners, including insurers, social analytics is the most popular analytics program companies are looking to pilot in the next couple years.

The Forrester report, “The State of Customer Analytics 2012,” involved an extensive survey of 90 enterprise customer analytics practitioners in banking, finance, utilities and professional services. In it, the majority of customer analytics practitioners in the report noted mature use of reporting and BI (69 percent), descriptive analytics (81 percent) and predictive models (73 percent) for customer metrics. That level of adoption and use puts analytic prowess in marketing and sales above most other enterprise departments. Now, these departments plan to take their next forays into returns and develop their customer data resources, with a somewhat mixed bag of plans, says Srividya Sridharan, a customer intelligence professionals analyst at Forrester and an author on the report.

When asked about the top customer analytics program they planned to pilot in the next two years, “social analytics” led the way, though 30 percent of respondents pegged social analytics returns as a long-term goal. This is not be surprising in terms of social media data interest, but definitely “indicates that social data is still a largely unexplored data source” at the present, says Sridharan.

Sridharan says she expects businesses that have already made investments in better customer data management and measurements to take a serious look at predictive analytics as a next step. However, the Forrester expert cautioned that enterprises need to evaluate what returns they would expect from a predictive platform before diving in to an implementation, as well as take an inward look at the information at hand and how it would be managed moving forward.

“One of the prerequisites for predictive analytics is to have the right type of customer-level data available and accessible at the appropriate granularity in order to build predictive models. While firms can pilot or build models based on predictive analytics techniques, where they need to focus more is in putting these models and scores to work through marketing execution systems that actually manage customer interactions,” Sridharan says.

How CIOs Can Extract Value from Big Data

In a large retail chain, Big Data was used to tweak product pricing at the store level in real time, based on an evolving set of criteria ranging from point-of-sale data, to email-based promotions, to local advertising. Much like a doctor starting a diagnosis by taking temperature and blood pressure, then gradually refining each subsequent test, the reporting generated by Big Data rapidly evolved as the “diagnosis” progressed, with marketing driving the effort and embedded IT staff adjusting the technical side of the house in real time, based on the recommendations of cross-functional analytical experts. In short, marketing asked the question, the analysts determined what data were needed to answer it, and the IT people implemented the technical aspect.

Facebook Tackles (Really) Big Data With ‘Project Prism’

Facebook is staring down at larger avalanche of data, and there are new limitations  that need fixing. This week, during a briefing with reporters at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, Parikh revealed that the company has developed two new software platforms that will see Hadoop scale even further. And Facebook intends to open source them both.

The first is called Corona, and it lets you run myriad tasks across a vast collection of Hadoop servers without running the risk of crashing the entire cluster. But the second is more intriguing. It’s called Prism, and it’s a way of running a Hadoop cluster so large that it spans multiple data centers across the globe.

“It lets us move data around, wherever we want,” Parikh says. “Prineville, Oregon.Forest City, North Carolina or Sweden.”

Crime fighters have long used brains and brawn, but now a new kind of technology known as “predictive policing” promises to make them more efficient. Colleen McCue, pictured on July 10, who is a behavioral scientist at GeoEye, a firm that works on predictive analytics, said studying criminal behavior was not that different from examining other types of behavior like shopping.

A growing number of law enforcement agencies, in the US and elsewhere, have been adopting software tools with predictive analytics, based on algorithms that aim to predict crimes before they happen. The concept sounds like something out of science fiction and the thriller “Minority Report” based on a Philip K. Dick story. Without some of the sci-fi gimmickry, police departments from Santa Cruz, California, to Memphis, Tennessee, and law enforcement agencies from Poland to Britain have adopted these new techniques. The premise is simple: criminals follow patterns, and with software — the same kind that retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon use to determine consumer purchasing trends — police can determine where the next crime will occur and sometimes prevent it. Colleen McCue, a behavioral scientist at GeoEye, a firm that works with US Homeland Security and local law enforcement on predictive analytics, said studying criminal behavior was not that different from examining other types of behavior like shopping. “People are creatures of habit,” she said.

75 percent of Insurers to Increase Data and Analytics Spend

Analytics increasingly provide competitive differentiation for insurers and are at the heart of the industry’s transformation to a more customer-centric business model, according to “Data and Analytics in Insurance: The Dawn of a New Era,” from Strategy Meets Action.

“Analytics hold great promise for the insurance industry, including the application of  traditional business intelligence approaches, as well as advanced techniques such as predictive models and Big Data,” said Mark Breading, SMA Partner. “The keys to success for insurers are improving data quality and data management, and  creating a corporate culture based on management by analytics.”

E-Commerce Style Big Data Analytics Meet Brick And Mortar Retailers

“In-store analytics now rivals online analytics in its depth, reliability, and usefulness,” wrote CEO Alexei Agratchev in VentureBeat. Stores can see where shoppers go, where they linger, detect whether they are shopping alone or with friends or children, and match shopping to weather. By equipping staff with RFID chips, they can see if sales people are interacting with customers.

Tim Callan, chief marketing officer at RetailNext, said web sites have been using analytics since the mid-1990s. “But people who run brick and mortar stores have not had the technology to optimize their stores. They have relied on crude tools such as walking around the store to see what they think is working well, but they have not been able to optimize the way e-tailers could.”

Business Intelligence (BI) Trends Go Beyond Analytics

The IDC’s latest big data report contains several new observations on the big data market, which the research firm says grew by almost 15 percent in 2011.

But as more machines take over the analytics and visualization, will the need for data scientists be minimized before it even really gets going as a career path?

Herscher ( CEO of FirstRain) thinks not. Noting the changes in BI that shook an industry over a decade ago, she recognizes the ongoing need for a human touch to analytics and doesn’t expect things to change this time around. Echoing much of the advice we’ve heard from proponents of big data like IBM, Herscher thinks that we in fact need more data science, and more students in the areas of math and science. The automation of data analysis and visualization has “made it easier to access and manage data,” Herscher says, “but it also developed a class of companies that build software and apps to manage this data.”

Can big data analytics reduce cyber risk?

The Information Security Forum (ISF) has released a report that recommends proactive, preventative big data analytics for businesses that want to increase business agility, improve information security and reduce cyber risks.

The report claims that the importance of big data analytics has never been greater however few organisations recognise the benefits for information security.

Does IT Really Care About Big Data?

Recent surveys show IT and business unit managers are more worried than eager about big data analytics– but those surveys are probably misleading, according to at least one expert.

A seminal study on big data by McKinsey and Co., for example, found that analysis of big data sets could enhance the productivity and competitiveness of many companies, save more than $300 billion in healthcare alone by increasing the industry’s efficiency, and help retailers increase profit margins by as much as 60%.

Another study, “The Future of Big Data” by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, reiterated the findings. It quoted Microsoft chief strategy officer Craig Mundie and Wal-Mart CIO Rollin Ford predicting that a “data-centered economy” in big data analysis will help both government and corporate organizations avoid big mistakes and waste by pointing out persistent errors in practice or belief.