BAM! Business Analytics Management…

Recent research has suggested that political and cultural organizational factors are the greatest challenge in adopting advanced decision analytics programs (articles referenced below).  ‘Analytics culture’ is framed as being a complex of: 1) fact-driven leadership, 2) expertise (tools and skills), and 3) processes (linking analytical insight to strategy and operational decision making). Critics and commentators […]

Blogging from the 2013 INFORMS conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in San Antonio, Texas, I would like to offer a big Texas ‘gefeliciteerd’ to the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis for their 2013 INFORMS Edelman Award for Operations Research and Management Science excellence achievement.  As well, congratulations on the impending coronation of Willem […]

Partly I feel the lack of attention, indeed expressed distaste for, project politics is rooted in a deep paradigmatic ‘business culture’ disconnect. Underneath any organization is a bundle of philosophical assumptions about what an organization is. The dominant paradigm in firms established in Western industrialized lands often derive from Protestant individualism and involve myths of the […]

The Smart City challenge, at root, is a complex ‘system of systems’ problem. Implementing a point solution such as an electricity Smart Grid, can cause knock-on instabilities if not coordinated and architected in conjunction with overlapping urban designs, such as emerging electronic vehicle transportation initiatives or Smart Cloud installations. PRESENTATION LINK: http://www.sark7.com/docs/Smart_City-Financial_Engineering.pdf Macro-systemic instabilities can emerge […]

In Jorge Luis Borges’ parable “On Rigor in Science” (“Del rigor en la ciencia”), a lost empire attains such perfection in the art of cartography that a one-for-one scale map of the empire is produced, laid-out across the land.  In time, the creation is understandably deemed useless and subsequent generations ambivalently witness the decay of […]

With 70% of the earth’s population expected to be living in urban settings by 2050, architecting sustainable cities via efficient resource supply chains is a major human imperative.  Whereas the technical infrastructures for advanced ‘smart city’ initiatives have been rapidly developing, an understanding of the associated political and economic dynamics raised by these emerging tools […]

Global organizations are beset by expanding complexity bearing accompanying uncertainty. In the wake of the still-unfolding Global Financial Crisis, an awareness of the destabilizing repercussions of misaligned incentives across an increasingly interconnected world are emerging, whether the frame be the mortgage industry, as per the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown; securities portfolio management, via reoccurring trading […]

Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a powerful, low impact method to examine the quality of organizational decision processes.  Such a tool is of interest to evidence-based managers, decision professionals, and analytics practitioners alike. Continuing our journey through ancient Greek myth and philosophy, today’s missive introduces the Agora.  The Agora was an ancient Greek assembly and […]

The Business Analytics Achilles Heel:  Organizational Politics In spite of overwhelming power and strength, a deadly vulnerability can lead to resolute destruction.  While the current generation likely has seen this in the guise of Star Wars in the form of poor ‘Death Star’ engineering, the ancient Greeks embodied this principle in the myth of Achilles.  It is proposed that organizational […]

Hello!  This week I am blogging from the 2012 Production & Operations Management (P&OM) 4th World Conference in Amsterdam.  An exciting conference for analytics professionals indeed.   Lest you applaud my travelling initiative, I should disclose I am currently based in the Netherlands, so my attendance at the conference was somewhat opportunistic. However, this should not […]