The Rise of Automated Analytics
By Thomas H. DavenportFor more than a decade I have talked about only three types of analytics: descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive. This trinity of analytics variations has worked well for me,...
View ArticleEra 4.0: The Scary Age of Automated Networks
I have written here and there about “Analytics 3.0,” an environment in which companies combine big and small data at significantly greater scope and scale of analytics. And even more recently I’ve...
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The Burgeoning Dilemmas of Managing Personal Data
As big data grows, so do concerns about privacy, security, ethics and regulation. In the U.S. citizens, consumers and businesses are very familiar—though not necessarily comfortable—with the fact that...
View ArticleThe Datafication of Business and Society
I first encountered the term datafication in The Rise of Big Data: How It’s Changing the Way We Think About the World, by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. Their 2013 Foreign Affairs...
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The World is Big Data’s Laboratory
Big data is beneficial, or course, but “the radical innovation is in big experimentation; the unprecedented ability to experiment with social systems at scale,” according to Sinan Aral (pictured), who...
View ArticleThe Shift to a New Data Architecture
I am not the first to say this—various IT vendors have made similar pronouncements—but I am confident that we are moving to a new data and technology architecture. This will be profound for everyone in...
View ArticleBuild Data Quality Into the Internet of Things
The clock on one of our office file cabinets (Redman’s) reads 10:32 a.m. on a Friday. There is every reason to believe it is correct. This clock synchronizes itself at 1 a.m. every day using a time...
View ArticleBig Data and Cloud: Fuel for Digital Business
Whether it’s searching for medical diagnoses or oil fields to explore, tracking Ebola outbreak patterns or interpreting retail marketing trends, big data is ushering in an era of exponential change....
View ArticleWhat Does It Mean to Be a Chief Analytics Officer?
I titled this column, “What Does It Mean to Be a Chief Analytics Officer,” because the CAO role has a certain titular appeal. However, it’s sometimes the case that those who lead analytics functions...
View ArticleLearning to Apply Data Science to Business Problems
This past semester I was involved in an interesting course at MIT’s Sloan School of Management - Analytics Labs (A-Lab). A-Lab’s objective is to teach students how to use data sets and analytics to...
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Can Big Data Protect a Firm From Competition?
New research by Anja Lambrecht and Catherine E. Tucker raises a provocative question: with all the petabytes of data now collected and viewed, are businesses more competitive? The answer is the key...
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Human or Machine: Who's Analyzing Your Data?
Arguably the most important question in analytics these days is, “Who (or what) is going to make the decision?” There are two fundamental answers: a human or a machine. How the question is answered has...
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Market Experimentation Meets Big Data
Business leaders are continuously seeking out new and improved ways to drive decisions and meet consumer needs. Many digital platform companies are conducting experiments with online users every minute...
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