Tag Archives: Big Data

Many data lakes are on life support - here's how to get yours to pay off in three steps. Get your data lake to pay off, not perish!

The DM3 provides an accurate and actionable segmentation of users and businesses against their current capabilities, requirements, skills and end-state objectives.

A recent article in Information Age named 10 attributes of data leader. Each of the experts quoted discussed just one attribute — in my case, it was separating hype from potential, which is critical when you’re dealing with advanced analytics. Here’s an excerpt of what I wrote for that article: “In the Big Data era, businesses have been told to save every scrap of data because it might turn out to be a valuable clue to customer understanding or business performance. While the cost of storing data has fallen dramatically, it doesn’t represent the true cost of data, which includes ensuring quality, maintaining freshness and mitigating the risk of a breach. “Data leaders are equally discerning about the hype and potential of the analytics used on their data. They focus on the problems the business needs to solve, and investigate new analytic techniques that can make their data “talk” in... [Read More]

Ever wonder how students use analytics to become entrepreneurs? At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Students of Georgetown, Inc. – commonly known as “The Corp” – is the largest entirely student-run non-profit corporation in the world, with seven subsidiary companies generating annual revenues in excess of $5 million. As participants in the FICO Academic Engagement Program, Georgetown students were given the opportunity to analyze Big Data from their seven storefronts using some of the industry’s most widely used analytics tools. Watch the video to find out how The Corp leveraged their findings from FICO analytics to monitor customer behavior and improve sales.

In many ways I think 2016 was the year that analytics hit the mainstream. At cocktail parties and in coffee shops, 2016 has been the year that we data scientists suddenly felt a bit like – dare I say it? – rock stars. A quick Google search provides a fascinating data point: “analytics 2015” returned 28.6 million hits “analytics 2016” returned 52.3 million hits Suffice it to say that in 2017, I believe that analytics, and the many domains it influences, will be a non-stop hit machine in terms of generating news headlines and ideas that fascinate us. Here are my predictions: 1. Security/IoT: Is your video cam no longer your friend?  In light of the recent Dyn attack, will 2017 be the year that your IoT device will turn on you? (Think Westworld, Humans, Terminator.) I think the answer is “yes.” In my recent blog, “Real talk: The imminent and... [Read More]

This blog is the final post in this series covering my FICO World keynote presentation, sharing the five steps organizations can take to improve their operational decision-making. 1. Capturing subject matter expertise 2. Intelligent solution creation 3. Faster insight to execution 4. Building institutional memory 5. Greater analytic accessibility In this blog I’ll cover the topic of greater analytic accessibility––which seems like it should be easy to achieve these days, but it is still elusive. In the age of the customer, Big Data is the key to intimately understanding customers’ desires and translating those desires into products, services and personalized experiences. This kind of differentiation is critical to companies’ achieving a competitive advantage. The challenge of Big Data is extracting meaningful, timely and actionable information from it at a reasonable cost. The complexities of doing so mean that two-thirds of businesses derive little or no tangible benefit from the information they hold. Only 4% of companies extract... [Read More]

Timo Berthold, a data scientist working in FICO’s Berlin research center, received the “GOR-Dissertationspreis 2015” prize this week for excellence in Ph.D. dissertations from the German Operations Research Society (GOR), at the society’s meeting in Vienna. GOR’s committee selected Berthold’s dissertation from among 18 worldwide that qualified for the annual award. Furthermore, Berthold’s dissertation was one of the “final four” in the biannual competition for the EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award (EDDA) 2015 presented by EURO, the European operations research society. Berthold describes his PhD research as “located at the intersection of operations research, computer science and applied mathematics.” He has been working on heuristic algorithms for mixed integer linear and nonlinear programming, and how to integrate them into mathematical optimization software to find provably optimal solutions. “I work on algorithms that try to rapidly construct a solution for a given system based on mathematical structures, collected statistics or empirical experience,” Berthold... [Read More]

How can you make best use of the explosion in the availability, complexity, variety and volume of data that occurred in the last decade, which is popularly known as Big Data?  Think!  Don’t be led, blindly, by the data, Big or otherwise. If you’re familiar with Big Data, you will be familiar with the four Vs of Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability – five if you add Veracity.  The word Big focuses us on the V of volume and talk quickly turns to exabytes and zettabytes (1021 bytes or 1,000 exabytes). You’ll have been told that all those zettabytes offer you great opportunities to gain profitable insights.  But do they? There is an implicit assumption that more data means more information.  There is a danger that if you blindly apply statistical and data mining tools to massive data sets you will be doing little more than numerology.  Given enough data... [Read More]