Where do fashion trends come from? A new IBM investigation of heel heights on women’s shoes demonstrates how social media mavens are using social networks to predict and influence important new fashion trends. Manufacturers and retailers who think that they control the trends need to start paying attention to a new category of influential tastemakers. Visit www.ibm.com/bao for more information.
New IBM study shows widening gap in analytics uptake and benefits
Companies that wait to advance their analytics capabilities do so at their peril, according to the second joint study by the IBM Institute for Business Value and the MIT Sloan Management Review. Almost sixty percent of organizations are now achieving competitive advantage with analytics — a 57 percent jump in just one year.
But this progress is very uneven. The new study, “Analytics: The widening divide,” found that the ability of late adopters to benefit from analytics dropped five percent from last year, even while progress among earlier adopters soared — up 66 percent for those with moderate experience levels, and 23 percent higher for those with the deepest experience. Performance outcomes obtained from the study underscored the opportunities. Transformed organizations that apply analytics for a competitive advantage are 3.4 times more likely to substantially outperform their industry peers.
IBM Training Computers To Predict Traffic
Traffic websites, with their color-coded maps of clogged streets and freeways, are good at telling commuters when congestion is already awful. But what if they could know not only where you drive, but if the route is going to be bad today, and warned you ahead of time?
A team of researchers at IBM Corp. are working on a system that would do just that.
They’ve combined sophisticated analytics software with a network of sensors the state has already embedded in roadways throughout California. With the help of a database of past traffic tie-ups, they say they can predict when they’ll happen in the future.
IBM, which worked with the state Department of Transportation and the California Center for Innovative Transportation at the University of California, Berkeley, can’t tell you when an accident is going to happen – yet. But John Day, an IBM manager, says that’s a natural extension of the work his team has been doing, and one day could well be something they could reasonably infer from the data they’re collecting.
For now, the researchers are showing that they can go a step beyond what’s available on regional traffic websites, which report current conditions. The most that might tell you is that your drive is already backed up.
Source: Huffington Post
Analyze This: Assurant Solutions Increases Customer Retention Rate with IBM Analytics (by ibmbusinessanalytics)
Assurant Solutions boosts customer affinity and rapport through IBM analytics - They have doubled their saved rates and tripled their saved fee rates.
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Bernard Chaus Inc., a $100 million, New York City-based garment maker has adopted IBM’s business analytics technology to help pare costs, clip revenue losses and improve margins …
Chaus officials reasoned that by streamlining sales and merchandising and upgrading the company’s ability to tap into timely sales performance data it could better respond to fluctuations in market demand to boost revenue.
Sky I.T. Group, a New York-based IBM business partner, provided Chaus with SkyPad, its Business-Intelligence-as-a-Service solution, to afford the company weekly, accurate sales information, rather than relying on data previously collected manually: “Business analytics technology provides tremendous value, especially as we look to expand our global operations,” said Ed Eskew, Chaus chief information officer.
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IBM keeps Bernard Chaus Fashion operations moving forward
NYC-based apparel manufacturer Bernard Chaus is using business analytics to improve sales, analyze in-season buying trends, and track the hottest selling products by store down to style, size and color. Retailers are increasingly looking to analytics technology to better predict and prepare for holiday shopping trends, make in-season changes and maximize their end of year sales. In the case of Bernard Chaus, business analytics technology is helping the company swiftly respond to consumer demand, and improve margin performance by significantly reducing its quarterly sales revenue losses from marked down inventory by nearly 50% over the past year.
Analytics: The new path to value
How the smartest organizations are embedding analytics to transform insights into action
Download the complete IBM Institute for Business Value study (602KB)
In every industry, in every part of the world, senior leaders wonder whether they are getting full value from the massive amounts of information their organizations already have. New technologies collect more data than ever before, yet many organizations still seek better ways to obtain value from their data and compete in the marketplace.
Knowing what happened and why it happened are no longer adequate. Leaders need to know what is happening now, what is likely to happen next and, what actions they should take for optimal results.
To help organizations understand the opportunity of information and advanced analytics, the MIT Sloan Management Review partnered with the IBM Institute for Business Value to conduct a survey of nearly 3,000 executives, managers and analysts working across more than 30 industries and 100 countries. The findings led to recommendations addressing different pieces of the information-and-analytics value puzzle:
- Focus on the biggest and highest value opportunities
- Within each opportunity, start with questions, not data
- Embed insights to drive actions and deliver value
- Keep existing capabilities while adding new ones
- Use an information agenda to plan for the future.
It takes big plans followed by discrete actions to gain the benefits of analytics. For analytics-driven insights to be consumed – that is, to trigger new actions across the organization – they must be closely linked to business strategy, easy for end users to understand, and embedded into organizational processes to take action at the right time.
Getting more value out of analytics
Smarter organizations are finding that if they want to use analytics for best advantage they need to do much more than getting good data and applying advanced mathematical models. They need to harness both passion and discipline to take the insights that come out of all that analytical work and infuse them into everyday processes and operations. A new study shows how organizations transformed by analytics are doing just that.
Based on a global survey of nearly 3,000 executives, IBM Institute for Business Value and MIT Sloan Management Review have jointly released “Analytics: the new Path to Value.” The study shows measurable benefits. Top-performing organizations – those that substantially outperform their industry peers – use analytics five times more extensively than lower performers. And they are twice as likely to use analytics to guide both day-to-day operations and future strategies.
- Download the study here.
- See the MIT Sloan Management Review for additional information, including the survey questions and answers.
- Join a live VPanel discussion on implications of the study Thursday, November 11
Big Data Means Big Sales: IBM to Buy Netezza for $1.7B: Cloud «
Netezza has been selling an appliance focused on data warehousing analytics and is finding a lot of traction with its products, mostly because most corporations are trying to find ways to make better sense of all the data locked in their data stores. EMC recently bought GreenPlum for similar reasons as well. And with sensor-based networks and data those networks produce making their way into data warehouses soon, it makes perfect sense for IBM to make a bold move.
Making sense of the data is viewed as a big opportunity, something Netezza understood very well. In this second quarter of 2010, Netezza saw its sales jump 45 percent year-over-year. Netezza has more than 350 clients across a variety of industries have adopted Netezza, including eHarmony.
What is “Big Data”?
According to ZDNet:
In simplest terms, the phrase refers to the tools, processes and procedures allowing an organization to create, manipulate, and manage very large data sets and storage facilities. Does this mean terabytes, petabytes or even larger collections of data? The answer offered by these suppliers is “yes.” They would go on to say, “you need our product to manage and make best use of that mass of data.” Just thinking about the problems created by the maintenance of huge, dynamic sets of data gives me a headache.
According to Tech Crunch:
Companies like AT&T, Visa, Bank of America, Ebay, Google, Amazon and more have massive databases they mine for competitive advantage. But lately, Big Data is finding its way to the smallest startups. The Web and cloud computing brings Big Data everywhere.
According to me:
Big data is the concept of managing large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. It means persisting data in such a way where you’re having to think outside of the box and not rely on the sure-fire means of the past (RDMS, Flatfile, XML, etc.).
From a usability stand-point big data must be reportable, searchable, and accessible to the relevant parties. It’s not meant to be archived off on tapes for “future needs”, but rather made available for machine learning opportunities, trending, and business intelligence.
While you may not have terabytes of data today, over time you will need to think about big data to properly address the needs of rigid data retention policies, increased customer growth, and historical data.
First public presentation of Geostellar capabilities. Geostellar is an Earth intelligence platform for the energy industry. We support sustainable development projects with high-resolution resource, infrastructure, production, policy and economic models derived from satellite, airborne and field sensor feeds.
Michael Rhodin - IBM Business Analytics
Rhodin, senior vice-president, IBM Software Solutions Group, discusses IBMs commitment to delivering new business analytics investments, solutions and services to help clients become smarter and more efficient
IBM SPSS software for predictive analytics
Predictive analytics helps your organization anticipate change so that you can plan and carry out strategies that improve outcomes. By applying predictive analytics solutions to data you already have, your organization can uncover unexpected patterns and associations and develop models to guide front-line interactions. This means you can prevent high-value customers from leaving, sell additional services to current customers, develop successful products more efficiently, or identify and minimize fraud and risk. Predictive analytics gives you the knowledge to predict…and the power to act.
“Lots of business people are captivated by the idea of using predictive analytics, but not every organization has analytics gurus on staff. IBM plans to bridge that gap with IBM SPSS Decision Management software. “It used to be that if you’re trying to do what-if modeling, you had to turn to statisticians, but there are only so many analytics Jedi Knights,” said Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group. “This new platform enables millions of business analysts to do what used to require statisticians, so it’s going to open up a whole new range of things that organization can do for themselves.”
