It Sure Is Noisy Around Here

This is what the combination of analytics and visualization does best – together they filter out the noise so that you are left with the core concerns. Decision making under uncertainty is tough enough – no sense wasting time and effort striving for precision and accuracy around the WRONG variables or issues. No matter how you choose to mix your metaphors, data visualization turns down the noise so that you can hear yourself think.

8 Tips for Aspiring Data Scientists

In the October 2010 edition of the Harvard Business Review, Thomas Davenport and D.J. Patil named “data scientist” as the “sexiest job of the 21 century.” As Big Data shifts from big news to big priority within even small businesses, data scientists will be hired to mine data, derive actionable insight from information and help both startups and mature businesses as they look to become more competitive and optimize operations.

If you’re interesting in becoming a data scientist, here are a few points to guide your career and ensure your resume is attractive for hot technology startups.

The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff

Most of us are technical. We like to be fact-driven. We embrace technologies of all flavors, including computer hardware, software, mobile devices, the Internet and social media. We tolerate opinions of others that differ from ours, but we prefer tangible, hard evidence that supports any position or argument. The problem is that organizations are made up of people, not just computers and equipment.

We like research studies and analytics to gain insights and foresights, as well as to solve problems and pursue opportunities. But, darn it, people get in the way.

Are You a Rebel?

Organizations need more “champion” behavior from their middle managers. Linkedin discussion groups frequently chatter about poor guidance from executives. A recent discussion had many discussants moaning about their CFO function’s reluctance to implement activity-based costing (ABC) principles for lame reasons such as it would result in two different sets of product costs or that ABC is too complicated to implement. This is nonsense.

Riddle: How are Analytics Like a Mosquito in a Nudist Colony?

There are so many opportunities to apply analytics today- it’s like being a mosquito in a nudist colony.

There is a problem, however, that not everyone thinks or behaves like a mosquito. They do not always inherently sense opportunities – the opportunities to apply analytics.

Perhaps I stretch this mosquito analogy too far when I presume that many opportunities may have insect repellent applied to them. For example, let’s consider the high expectations of service at a five star hotel. Ever wait in a long line at your hotel check out during the morning rush with others checking out? It might not appear cost-justified to the hotel, but it may be a very valuable extra expense to add one or more front desk staff if you irritate an important and delayed social media influencer who will complain on Twitter or TripAdvisor.com. How would you know? It is an opportunity for an analyst’s experiment or survey. The insect repellant analogy implies that an analyst may not “sense” an opportunity.

How Far Would You Go…

… To Achieve Perfection In Your Information Management Initiatives?

Over a good few years, I have been fortunate to have experienced a variety of Information Management projects aimed at achieving an even more kaleidoscopic set of objectives (or lack of) out here in the Middle East (more specifically the GCC).

These projects have covered a variety of sources of information from Paper to PDF, from Web to Word, from Data to Documents.

The projects have also behaved in manners that depict a multiple-personality disorder, from Chaos to Calmness, from Schizophrenic to Stable, from Spontaneous to Structured, from Illogical to Intelligent.

Game On! A TV Game Show for IT and Analysts?

Imagine a game show featuring three competing teams of contestants who are given a business problem involving choices. They get one week to design and test their hypotheses through experiments and return to the show with their answers. A panel of CEOs would judge the winning team.

Why not provide analysts, and the important role they perform, more visibility to the public? Make it fun. The popular TV show “The Big Bang Theory” highlights physicists. So why not have a TV game show for analysts and IT specialists to show off their investigative and discovery skills? We might call it “The Big Data Theory!”