It is not all that long ago that the big credit crunch banks were being lambasted in some quarters for their plans to invest heavily in Chinese banks, and that at least one pundit was predicting “The Coming Collapse of China”. How things change! Now it is the titans of Wall Street and the City [...]

A little while ago I had a conversation with an academic whose expertise is in political decision-making and negotiation. I described my interest in analytics and automated decision-making, and information systems in general. “I guess,” he said, “these companies you work with have some specific decisions in mind when they put all these information systems [...]

My hope in this presidential election is that more attention would be devoted to how we are going to make a living in the future. The United States was once the world’s leader in knowledge work: science, technology, engineering, analytics, and the application of computers and communications to business. While we still do reasonably well [...]

I am speaking today at the FastForward conference in Orlando. I’m talking about analytics and how they relate to search, but I came early and caught Andy McAfee’s talk last night about Enterprise 2.0. As usual, Andy was articulate and perspicacious. He justifiably shifted the focus in his talk from praising the glories of E2.0 [...]

I work with companies on a variety of application domains for technology and analytics. One of the questions that often arises is, “Where should we start?” They want to know where they can get the greatest return on their efforts. Increasingly I want to tell them—perhaps a bit more diplomatically—the title of this post. Pricing, [...]

It’s clear that one of the major problems in our current economy is that senior executives in financial firms have relied on faith to ensure that their analytics are correct and their risks are tolerable. In search of outsized returns, they’ve taken on investment and debt securities that are bundled up in algorithmic combinations that [...]

Last spring, on baseball’s Opening Day, I confidently identified the Boston Red Sox on these very pages as the eventual World Series winner—based in part on their analytical prowess. You may recall that I was correct in that prediction. This Sunday, I will go out on a much more solid limb and pick the Patriots [...]