arcplan Makes Chaos Comprehensible

arcplan makes its living on the chaos of its customers, is how Dwight deVera, senior vice president, describes the firm’s business.

Financial services firms are a favorite target since they always seem to be acquiring new businesses, meaning they have systems that don’t talk to each other, even if they come from the same vendor. When Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch, both were running SAP.

“But you can’t consolidate across them. Just because they run the same software doesn’t mean that any of their requirements match. They have thousands of discrete requirements, and some requirements contradict others.” They could try to harmonize the two systems, said deVera, but they would never get the job done.

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The Business Intelligence Operations Center

A presentation by Wired contributing editor Gary Wolf at [email protected] showing what is available for tracking and analyzing your body, mood, diet, spending—just about everything measurable in daily life. (Wolf also is also the co founder of the Quantified Self, a blog about “self-knowledge through numbers.”)

Gary talks about the importance of becoming aware of our own personal data by turning inward for self improvement, discovery and knowledge. By knowing ourselves better we can be more effective in the world. The same is true for knowing our data and analysis better. How do we connect with the data that we analyze day to day in our quest to provide meaningful solutions to day-to-day organizational issues?

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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.

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The Higher You Are, The Less You Know

Executives may be brilliant strategists. But strategists need foot soldiers to carry out tasks. The higher the executives are, the less they can know about what is happening. Yes, there can be summarized reporting and executive scorecards and dashboards. But monitoring the dials is not the same thing as moving the dials.

What strategies are most useful as performance improvement levers?

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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!”

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15th Century Big Data - What Can We Learn From It?

“Big Data” is in vogue today. It’s the new fashion in business and technology. It’s a phenomenon that is difficult to explain but somehow managed to trek from the Technology Street to Wall Street and now blazing its trails into the Main Street.

The technocrats, the data scientists and the business executives are claiming that there hasn’t been anything like this throughout the human history.

But, is this true?

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Today We Celebrate a Woman Who Saw the Future of Computers

Happy Birthday, Ada Lovelace.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day celebrating the life of Lady Lovelace, a nineteenth-century countess who published a paper that might be the first computer program ever devised. Ada Lovelace Day uses her as a symbol for women in science, hoping to bolster support for girls around the world who might be discouraged from pursuing science, technology, engineering, math, chemistry and the like.

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