Each week, I try to gather up a set of business analytics news articles that I find useful – and that would be of interest to business analytics and business intelligence practitioners. Here’s my list for the week of October 15, 2012.
- CNBC posted a special report on how Sears, Macy’s, and other brands have used predictive analytics to revitalize longstanding lines of business, and offers some thoughts on its limitations. (Analytics isn’t a cure-all, and sometimes, the business answers you seek really are obvious).
- InformationWeek describes how an online retailer segmented their customers and generated cross-sells using data techniques common in genetic science. This is a great article that acknowledges how business analytics techniques are usually borrowed from basic scientific research.
- From the Philadelphia Inquirer, the 76ers buck the sabremetrics trend highlighted in the movie Moneyball and hire a general manager that doesn’t have an MBA.
- Information Week gives a rundown of Pittsburgh Healthcare System‘s $100m new comprehensive data warehousing project designed to unify clinical, operational, and other data, built around Oracle Exadata, IBM Cognos, and dbMotion’s health information exchange software.
- Pedro Hernandez at Enterprise Apps Today comments on HP’s entry into the business analytics professional services market, joining IBM, Deloitte, Accenture, and several other major players. Like IBM, HP’s strategy seems to involve bundling in their own hardware when possible.
- David Norris at IT-Director.com comments on TIBCO’s upcoming Spotfire 5 release, and has high hopes for the product’s updated technical architecture and its potential fit as an ‘enterprise-ready’ rapid data visualization tool.