Putting Predictive Analytics to Work

Excellent article by Robert Mitchell at Computer World titled 'Putting predictive analytics to work - Contrary to popular opinion, you don't need a huge budget to get started.'

I couldn't agree more. It begins:

The Orlando Magic's analytics team spent two years honing its skills on the business side.

"Eighteen to 20 months ago, we knew virtually nothing about predictive analytics," says Anthony Perez, director of business strategy for the National Basketball Association franchise. While his team was in fact working on predictive analytics well before that, Perez added, their tools weren't powerful enough to give them insights they needed, and the group needed to scale up its efforts.

You can read the entire article here.

Banks know all about you - and forget

Article in Sydney Morning Herald by Michael Pascoe. Discusses how much about us banks should know, yet how little in reality many of them actually do know. Most of the people I know who work in insight in banks are as frustrated as Michael is, in as much as they know they can be doing a lot more interesting things that really help both their customer and their bank - but the entire infrastructure on which the bank rests just does not enable it; and the type of spend that it takes to remedy it is one that has to be decided upon at the very highest of levels.

The comments down the bottom are worth reading too, for balance.

The article begins:

It's labour market lotto again tomorrow with the nation's market economists making apparently random guesses about how many jobs have been created or lost.
The strange thing is, the big four banks' economists should know.
That they don't is symptomatic of our banking cartel's inability to use the information they possess.
The big four collectively should know just about everything there is to know about us as we can barely sneeze without making an entry in one of their vast databases. (And even when we sneeze, we're likely to use a tissue that was purchased with a piece of plastic processed by a bank.)

You can read the full article here.