The Predictive Analytics for Everyone Blog has moved!

Apologies for making it more complicated than it needs to be, but this blog has now moved to:  www.11antsanalytics.com/blog  where we continue to write about things analytics.

In case anybody ever doubted it...(!) here is an article by Doug Henschen in Information Week summarizing the latest Forrester Wave report - urging that predictive analytics get made simpler. I'd like to think that is the sound of our crusade gathering momentum - for sure worth reading, see below.

Our experience would be that it is very true, we have business users in some of the largest companies in the world licensing our software and successfully using it to solve predictive analytics problems. As many times as not, the customers are companies where the big, expensive, complicated solutions are available to them - the problem is they just can't use them.

We'd even made a small video on this very topic - you can watch it here.

Analytics Vendors Must Make Prediction Easier, Forrester Says

Forrester Wave report urges SAP, IBM and eight other vendors to come up with advanced analytics software that's less daunting to business users.

You can read the the full article here.

Putting Predictive Analytics to Work

Excellent article by Robert Mitchell at Computer World titled 'Putting predictive analytics to work - Contrary to popular opinion, you don't need a huge budget to get started.'

I couldn't agree more. It begins:

The Orlando Magic's analytics team spent two years honing its skills on the business side.

"Eighteen to 20 months ago, we knew virtually nothing about predictive analytics," says Anthony Perez, director of business strategy for the National Basketball Association franchise. While his team was in fact working on predictive analytics well before that, Perez added, their tools weren't powerful enough to give them insights they needed, and the group needed to scale up its efforts.

You can read the entire article here.

Banks know all about you - and forget

Article in Sydney Morning Herald by Michael Pascoe. Discusses how much about us banks should know, yet how little in reality many of them actually do know. Most of the people I know who work in insight in banks are as frustrated as Michael is, in as much as they know they can be doing a lot more interesting things that really help both their customer and their bank - but the entire infrastructure on which the bank rests just does not enable it; and the type of spend that it takes to remedy it is one that has to be decided upon at the very highest of levels.

The comments down the bottom are worth reading too, for balance.

The article begins:

It's labour market lotto again tomorrow with the nation's market economists making apparently random guesses about how many jobs have been created or lost.
The strange thing is, the big four banks' economists should know.
That they don't is symptomatic of our banking cartel's inability to use the information they possess.
The big four collectively should know just about everything there is to know about us as we can barely sneeze without making an entry in one of their vast databases. (And even when we sneeze, we're likely to use a tissue that was purchased with a piece of plastic processed by a bank.)

You can read the full article here.

On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels

Predictive Analytics related article in the Wall Street Journal. The article begins:

Orbitz Worldwide has found that people who use Apple Inc.'s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see.

The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people's online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information—in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac—to start predicting their tastes and spending habits.

It's a short, but actually thought provoking article. The headline would lead one to believe that Mac users were being exploited, however in my view this is far from the case. Rather what is happening is that Mac users are being delivered to those hotels which they are proven to be more likely to book; and if we know anything, it is that getting somebody to what they actually want to buy faster on an e-commerce site is a win for everyone - both the buyer and the seller.

It begs thinking more on the fact that too often we are working on the assumption that price is the most important factor to the buyer - when clearly it is only one consideration.

You can read the full article here.