SCTR7: Data Science and Analytics

With a number of recent Hollywood films representing intelligent machines as either hero or villain, the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has attracted the imagination of the media and popular culture. On the practical engineering side, over the past decade humanity’s age-old dream of developing intelligent machines has experienced rapid development.  The prospect of expert […]

As an analytics professional, it may perhaps be no surprise that I believe in a world which is susceptible to analysis – a world which yields to scientific inquiry. Further, I believe that if we invest effort, if we exert what Kahneman would call our System 2, we can improve decisions and overcome our tendency […]

Increasingly sophisticated analytics tools and methods are available to derive business insight from data.  However, as a discipline which drives insight from data, the crucial ‘last step’ in the analytics process is about organizational decision making.  A sophisticated, intensive analysis may all be for naught if the crucial last step, framing and committing to a decision, misses the […]

Recently I was chastised for being ‘unnecessarily obscure’ for reacting to a specious conclusion by suggesting that it risked ‘conflating correlation with causation’. Guilty as charged!  I apologize:  the expression is quite a mouthful and requires unraveling for those unfamiliar with the nuances of the applied experimental method.  However, I feel passionately that this concept […]

  This is a review committee working group for practitioners and academics to establish a formal definition and set of classification criteria regarding business analytics model risk. This group has been established based upon interest and feedback concerning a recent set of posts regarding business analytics model risk: http://tinyurl.com/ktabt3q For those interested, you can join the […]

Business analytics model risk (part 0 of 5): framing model risk – the complexity genie and the challenge of deciding on decision models Introduction to a series of five articles on model risk Here we introduce a series of five articles seeking to frame, define, and categorize business analytics model risk.  The intention is to […]

Business analytics model risk (part 4 of 5):  categorizing model risk Following from article 3 of 5 on Business Analytics Model Risk Link to introductory header article (0 of 5) Model risk cannot easily be spoken of as a singular entity.  The topic is complicated in that there are multiple ways of categorizing model risk.  As […]

PART OF A SERIES ON ADOPTING ANALYTICS CULTURE: 1 of 7 LINK TO HEADER ARTICLE What does change management have to do with business analytics? Along with feverish interest in business analytics (BA) and ‘Big Data’ has been an interest in how organizations can adopt ‘analytics culture’ to evolve what has been called ‘analytics maturity’ […]

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 […]

60 Second Book Review: ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by D. KahnemanKahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a breath of fresh air and the promise of ‘a new way forward’ for business and commerce. Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in Economics, makes a clear […]