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On Using the Data You Control for Analytics, First…

Greta Roberts [pictured], President & CEO at Talent Analytics Corp and Faculty Member of the International Institute for Analytics writes: Many businesses are entering new and exotic areas of analytics, with initiatives to capture social media, job market information, and the like. These are exciting efforts, no doubt – but often the problem one is trying to solve with much of this external information can be tackled more easily if business intelligence groups first focus on data sources closer to home and easier to control.

While those external data sets can indeed be valuable, for performance sake it’s better to first focus on what you have – and still keep an eye on technological developments externally.  More...

The need for “Analytical Service Lines”

International Institute for Analytics Director of Research and faculty leader Thomas H. Davenport posted in IIA faculty blogs: As analytics grow more popular and central to business strategies, there is also a need to produce analytical miracles repeatedly, reliably, and quickly. The old days in which an analyst could take his or her time to produce custom analytical solutions are almost gone; instead, groups of analysts need to have “analytical service lines” in place. Some organizations might refer to them as “analytical solutions.” More…

Big Data Means Big Need for BI-Educated College Grads

Darryl McDonald [pictured], Executive Vice President & CMO at Teradata writes in SmartData Collective: As an industry, we need to help the BI Congress with the context part of that equation by making curriculum realistic. We can do that by providing large data sets, real-world problems to solve, and case studies.

That’s why our Teradata University Network already has processes and mechanisms in place to deliver these fundamental tools, and more than 1200 schools in 85 countries are already taking advantage of them. More…

It's Social Media Day! Measuring Brand Sentiment with Social Media

David A. Schweidel, Wendy W. Moe and Chris Boudreaux [pictured] write: With the proliferation of social media, questions have begun to emerge about its role in firms’ marketing research programs. In this research, we investigate the potential to “listen in” on social media conversations as a means of inferring brand sentiment. More...

Case Study: Ball State Professor Uses ABC Data to Teach the Business of Magazines

Eleanor Overton, Assistant Manager, Marketing & Sales at Audit Bureau of Circulations posted on The NewsBulletin Blog: Professor David E. Sumner [pictured] teaches magazine writing and management courses in the Department of Journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. Ball State’s department is one of the ten largest in the country. Sumner describes JOUR 328: Magazine Management as a “macro-view of trends and issues in the magazine industry.” More…

Beyond Privacy: Data for All and All for Data

Steve Smith, Digital Media Editor at Media Industry Newsletter (MIN) writes at MediaPost: A bold and fascinating new perspective on the data debates is emerging this season from academia in the form of an article called "The Tragedy of the Data Commons" forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School Jane Yakowitz [pictured] takes issue with some of the core preoccupations of privacy regulators and argues for a "Data Commons" in which anonymized public research data could be pooled and used by researchers, policy-makers, and scholars to understand ourselves better and plot smarter policy. More…

Data-Driven Decisions Can Aid Companies' Productivity

Steve Lohr of The New York Times writes: Mr. (Erik) Brynjolfsson [pictured] and his colleagues, Lorin Hitt, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Heekyung Kim, a graduate student at M.I.T., studied 179 large companies. Those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology, the researchers said. More...

In US, MIT Media Lab and Aegis Team Up For Digital Insights

Les Luchter of MediaPost writes: Aegis Media has signed a sponsorship agreement with MIT Media Lab, giving the holding company first crack in implementing its developments in social, mobile, data and insights.

Aegis will be involved specifically with the Media Lab's Digital Life consortium, which "conducts basic research on technologies and techniques that spur expression as well as social and economic activity." That fits well with the company's goal of "bringing ecommerce and content ever closer together," says Nigel Morris [pictured], CEO of Aegis Media North America, which is leading the global sponsorship. More...

Turning to Academics for Analytic Insight

William M. Bulkeley writes at Technology Review: StubHub agreed to work with the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, a three-year-old organization that aims to make connections between companies with lots of data and academics from multiple universities who want to figure out new ways to analyze it. Originally called the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, it changed its name this year to reflect its goal of working with more traditional companies rather than just online media. Cofounder Peter Fader [pictured], a Wharton marketing professor, hopes it will soon be working with a pharmaceutical company, a financial services firm, and some nonprofit organizations. More...

In US, The Wharton School Launches Customer Analytics Initiative

PHILADELPHIA, Jan 11, 2011 -- The Wharton Interactive Media Initiative (WIMI), a research center at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, announces its expansion to become the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI). Through the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, world-class researchers collaborate with leading-edge businesses to ask and answer critical data-driven questions. Many businesses have come to the recent realization that customer analytics is at the heart of what will give them a meaningful competitive edge; WCAI will help them understand how to leverage the individual-level data that they collect about their customers' online and offline behaviors.

"Many leading firms are starting to hire top talent in this area," says Eric Bradlow, the K.P. Chao Professor of Marketing, Statistics and Education, Vice-Dean of Wharton Doctoral Programs and Co-Director of WCAI. "We will not only be poised to meet this growing demand, but to shape it. We will create interest among prospective applicants to Wharton and Penn, and will work with firms to encourage the hiring of top Wharton and Penn talent for these emerging positions." More...