Analytics

All the hype about Big Data over the past year has succeeded in educating executives in organizations of all sizes across nearly every industry about the unprecedented potential to use analytics to improve operations, sales effectiveness and customer support. However, the hype has also too often mad...

Call center software can now identify everything from anger to dissatisfaction in the voices of customers. Since call centers are all about voices, it makes sense to analyze those voices in order to provide better customer service. The field of voice analytics, in fact, has become a big business. B...

Everyone has a year-end synopsis these days, and it's fun to see what each person deems important. Sometimes you wonder if you lived through the same experiences, but it's a good thing to recall everything one more time and maybe reconsider how you'll remember each. Here's my synopsis -- which is no...

I was doing some research in the Time Magazine archives -- the best ones I have seen, by the way -- the other day and came across this nugget from 1962: "Despite the discouraging results so far, many scientists argue that military-space research will ultimately produce an overflowing cornucopia of m...

Recently while presenting the findings of a Big Data survey to an executive team, I was a bit taken aback when the CEO stopped me and said, "I'll listen to what you learned from the survey as long as you don't use those two words again -- 'Big Data' -- I've already told my team there will be hell to...

This year's EMC Industry Analyst Summit included numerous highlights familiar to regular IT conference attendees: a self-generated report card on the previous year's activities and a discussion of plans for the year ahead, for example. Few, however, offer the level of access EMC does by holding cand...

Has the emergence of social technology been faster than the rollout of other advanced technologies like CRM and ERP? If it has, why? I have recently been reading a dense technical book from 1990 with the improbable title -- for CRM -- "The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures -- Dynamics of Evolution an...

It's become clear that the true political star of the 2012 election was Big Data. There is much that marketers can learn from its meteoric rise. Trumping the old-school, gut-instinct days of electoral politics, today's campaigns employ data crunchers who mine the campaign's database for clues on wha...

Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched RedShift, an on-demand data warehouse service that is optimized for the analysis of huge sets of data. RedShift is "profoundly disruptive," said Merv Adrian, research vice president of information management at Gartner. Its success will move the economic bou...

As a callow youth, I enlisted in the Navy and found myself at sea aboard the USS Gray as a bosun's mate. That meant standing a lot of watch on the bridge, and being on the bridge meant knowing how to report positions of other things based on a 360-degree arc. The idea was to have a 360-degree view o...