This week, a look at a video that changed everything for data analysts in 2006, Oracle talks about the changing analytics market, and CIO.com drives home what should be an obvious point. As usual, here are my favorite business analytics stories from the past week, and why I think they’re important.
A video that changed everything: Hans Rosling’s “Stats that reshape your worldview” TED Talk
In 2006, Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician and statistician, changed how many of us in business and education think about using data to tell very complex stories with his TED Talk on global health and economic development. Think statistics cannot be engaging, entertaining, and exciting? Go get some popcorn and buckle in for this video.
Oracle is planning self service BI and mobile analytics offerings for 2013, according to Madeline Bennett from V3.
Mobile BI is still evolving, but quickly, and self-service BI has been on the offering sheets of several vendors for year. No surprise there. When asked what is driving the business intelligence and analytics software market an an executive from Oracle points to two things: mobile business intelligence and the desire for software vendors to provide complete solution.
The executive goes on to spell out all of the capabilities that such a complete solution should have, including: “BI scorecards, dashboards and reports; performance management; advanced analytics and predictive analytics; and real time and automated decision making.” SAS, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and MicroStrategy are all on the hunt as far as I can tell.
Data Analytics Will Fail If Executives Ignore the Numbers, from CIO.com
Analytics only work if executives *act* on the insights they earn through analysis. End of story. Apparently, this isn’t always so easy.