Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives bring a variety of advantages to business, from increased awareness to alliance with community causes, health and safety and further definition of your brand while benefiting society. But in order to continually improve returns, campaigns need to be analyzed from a social media perspective.
The Real-Time Web has matured to the point where it is now possible to collect enough data and perform detailed analysis on almost any customer or potential customer. This analysis can be used to enhance more traditional means of determining payment terms. The potential market for the application of Big Data Real-Time Technology and process models has never been larger and timing never better.
There is a condition known as pareidolia, the human tendency to read significance into random or vague stimuli (both visual and auditory).
Interestingly, data professionals usually think that computers processing data won’t make these same mistakes. Is this true?
For most organizations, cash is king, and optimizing the order-to-cash cycle has become a strategic priority.
An equally important priority in today’s business environment is compliance with an ever-increasing and complex body of regulatory requirements. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act require that all business processes be effectively monitored; however, the complex nature of the order-to-cash cycle presents a number of challenges to the effective testing and monitoring of internal controls.
How do you optimize the O2C (Order-To-Cash) cycle using big data?
As more businesses consider the benefits of social media, champions are increasingly asked to prove tangible business value. In its continuing analysis of the impact of social media on sales and marketing initiatives, Nucleus has found that companies can achieve significant benefits by adding social capabilities to CRM deployments, including reduced costs, increased sales, improved employee productivity, and improved brand visibility.
One of the most head-scratching tech headlines of April 2011 was the news thatKosmix, a Mountain View, CA-based startup best known for building a Twitter filtering tool called TweetBeat, had been acquired by Walmart. Yes, that Walmart—the one with 9,000 big-box stores spread across the American heartland.
There was speculation that Walmart’s real interest was in Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who have unbeatable pedigrees in the world of e-commerce technology. The pioneering comparison shopping site they co-founded in 1996, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million; inside Amazon, the pair helped to create the e-retailer’s huge marketplace of third-party retailers and came up with the technology behind Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perhaps Walmart—which paid $300 million for Kosmix, according to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher—wanted Harinarayan and Rajaraman to work similar miracles for Walmart.com?
What do the Olympics and the global economy have in common?
Many times, the teams that focus on their strategy, prioritize goals, and have the resources to focus on infrastructure, training, and process, are the ones which win the most medals.
Our lives have become hectic.
We are working harder and longer. We talk about life balance, but for so many of us we continue to have imbalance. Every once in a while we need to step back, press the “pause” button on the Stairmaster exercise machine, take some deep breaths, and reflect on just what the heck is going on. I’d like to reflect with you my take on what is driving the accelerating interest in analytics and Big Data.
What type of data do our brains need to evaluate one of the most important aspects of business planning, ie The Forecast?
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As leaders and managers of human beings with million year-old brain structures, as part of our managerial toolkit we need to keep ourselves knowledgeable about psychology and the cognitive science of how people make decisions. You have undoubtedly read about how innately bad we are at making certain types of decisions, especially those involving risk, probabilities and shifting time horizons.
Part of the reason for this difficulty is the structure and function of our three-layered brain. The complexity and size of the neocortex, especially the pre-frontal cortex, is a very recent evolutionary development. Prior to this development, our mammalian ancestors still made decisions, but they did so relying heavily on the more intuitive, emotional limbic layer. It would be fairly accurate to say that our emotions are simply a different way to make a decision. It’s quick, can still be trained by experience and learning, and can be wired directly into rapid motor responses that most likely saved our ancestors lives countless times, who faced more binary decisions than probabilistic ones. Gut-feel is really “brain-feel”.
When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus. But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than you might initially think, the most important courses you took in college turn out to be psychology, philosophy, literature, sociology and anthropology.
We all bring important skills to the myriad of different conversations we participate in every day, and while confrontation and intervention might not be your cup of tea, applying the right type of analytics to the problem, consistent with its level in the Conversation Pyramid, can immediately make you and your team valuable in either catalyzing your own organizational transformation, or simply improving your organization’s value creation or mission effectiveness.