Okay folks, here is this week’s analytics news roundup. As usual, I’ve tried to pull together a list of articles that I think are important to analytics practitioners – and why. Here’s my list for the week of October 29, 2012.
Forbes ran a good introductory article about business analytics, using the moving Moneyball as a starting point for explaining how data-driven decision making is leading to results in business.
- (Patrick Taylor from Oversight Systems gives a good real world example of spend management analytics that IMHO most business owners should read, then heads into a discussion of Big Data. Personally, I still think we as practitioners are confusing the marketplace by lumping Big Data in with analytics so frequently – I agree that they are related, but there is an awful lot to gain from analytics before a company gets anywhere near Hadoop or real time transaction analysis. This isn’t a criticism of Mr. Taylor, merely my thought that the Big Data fury is crowding out a lot of good discussion on topics that are more relevant to much of the marketplace).
PR Newswire pushed out a press release from Streamline Health Systems and the Mountain State Health Alliance announcing a decision by the 13 hospital consortium in Tennessee and West Virginia to implement a health care analytics solution.
- (Normally I don’t spend much time on press releases, but there’s good stuff here. The article highlights the most frequent analytics use case – taking financial transaction data from existing systems and finding ways to improve collections or minimize financial waste. We spend a lot of time thinking about data – this is why.)
Information Management recaps IBM’s recent Big Data strategy announcements.
- (Mark A. Smith from Ventana Research frames IBM’s announcements around a pretty good list of big data management technologies and the things we as analysts usually do with them. )
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), a worlwide aviation trade group, has selected Pentaho as its business intelligence platform.
- (Yes, this is another press release, but what’s interesting about it is that the organization has elected to implement Pentaho – by some reports the leading open source business intelligence and analytics platform. Oh, and IATA is pretty interesting as well – apparently they represent over 200 airlines, help set aviation prices and assign those nifty three letter airport designators. )
Apparently, Sears is running a Teradata enterprise warehouse appliance .
- (Nothing earth shattering here, but it’s been reported before that Macy’s and Bloomingdales’ are Teradata clients as well. The takeaway here is that if you’re going to get into the retail business these days, be prepared to analyze….well….just about everything in real time.)