As Kevin Lynch, CTO of The Information Lab in Dublin, was describing how his organization uses the Hypothesis Development Canvas, it occurred to me that Kevin was actually using the canvas to tell a story about how his organization uses data science to uncover new sources of value (see Figure 1).…

We live in a world driven by insights and decision making fueled by data and analytics. Information and technologies are so ubiquitous that no organization needs to be a digital titan (such as Amazon or Google) to compete in today’s world of business. Companies, large and small, are recognizing the need to utilize the full value of their…

Leverage AI to Create Autonomous Policies that Adapts without Human Intervention

Policies are the foundation for any successful organization.  Policies are the rules, or laws, of an organization.  Policies document the principles, best practices and compliance guidelines that aid decision-making in supporting the consistent and repeatable operations of the business. Heck, one could argue that an organization’s culture is better defined by its policies than it…

“It is hard to teach an old dog new tricks.  They’ve only been in business for 155 years.”

 – Anonymous

The Pullman Co (1867), Allied Corp (1920), Heinz (1869), Hughes Tool (1908), Ford Aerospace (1956), Motorola (1928), Bethlehem Steel (1857), Ralston Purina (1894), Compaq (1982), E.F. Hutton (1904), PaineWebber (1880), MCI (1983), Eastern Airlines (1926) and Pan Am Airlines (1927), Houston Natural Gas / Enron (1940), Arthur Andersen (1913),…

They say that the best ideas sometimes come to you while you are in the shower, and this idea of how to explain two important Neural Network concepts – Backpropagation and Stochastic Gradient Descent – actually did come to me as I was trying to set the perfect water temperature for my morning shower.

As I was struggling to adjust the two shower handles – one handle that controlled scolding hot and the other handle that controlled flash freezing – it occurred to me that I was a simple…

I hate it when I hear senior executives state that they want to become data-driven, as if somehow having data is value in of itself.  Now, one can hardly blame the unenlightened executive whose only perspectives on data are associated with statements like “Data is really the new oil” (Wall Street Journal) or “…

I grew up in a small manufacturing town in Northeast Iowa.  The factory in my hometown made tractors (no surprise given that it was Iowa), but eventually the economics of cheap foreign labor and an interconnected global economy caught up with that factory – as it did with many US-based manufacturers – and soon the factory closed, and many people were laid off.

But the technology world continues to evolve – especially with respect to IoT, Data Science and AI/ML – and so…

There is a phrase in baseball about pitchers “pitching through pain” that refers to pitchers taking the mound to pitch even though they have aches and pains – sore arms, stiff joints, blisters, strained muscles, etc. The idea is that these pitchers are so tough that they can pitch effectively even though they are not quite physically right. 

However, when the human system is asked to do…

This is the next blog in my random series on better understanding some of these advanced Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning algorithms. This “episode” takes on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Hope you enjoy my “Deep Learning” learning journey.

I originally wrote in “Transforming from Autonomous to Smart: Reinforcement Learning Basics” how…

Please join me in Las Vegas at Hitachi Vantara’s NEXT 2019 in October where I’ll be…

Imagine an advanced fighter aircraft is patrolling a hostile conflict area and a bogie suddenly appears on radar accelerating aggressively at them. The pilot, with the assistance of an Artificial Intelligence co-pilot, has a fraction of a second to decide what action to take – ignore, avoid, flee, bluff, or attack.  The costs associated with False Positive and False Negative are substantial – a wrong decision that could potentially provoke a war or lead to the death…

At first glance, data science and customer experience (CX) don’t have much in common.

Data scientists like me are typical left-brained thinkers: detail-oriented, logical and quantitative. We want to study, process and analyze data to extract insights from it. Customer experience experts, on the other hand, gravitate toward a more intuitive and creative…

What if you had a corporate asset that was never used?  Your first response might be that corporate asset obviously has no value.  And you’d probably be right. However, there are costs – acquisition costs, maintenance costs, storage costs, depreciation costs, salvage costs – associated with all assets. So, to incur all of those costs and then not do anything with that asset would be fiduciary negligence at its worse. 

Welcome to the world of dark…

Landing a man on the moon 50 years ago was a true feat of genius, and an outstanding collaboration between many different stakeholders with many differing individual agendas and objectives (not exactly something we’re seeing out of our government leaders today).

BusinessWeek magazine, as always, published an exceptional article titled “Five Management Lessons the Apollo…

I’ve written several times about how the “economies of learning” are more powerful than the “economies of scale”.  Through a continuous learning and refinement process, organizations can simultaneously drive down marginal costs while accelerating time-to-value and de-risking projects via digital asset re-use and refinement (see Figure 1).…

The business, economic and social good that can be delivered courtesy of data science is almost unbounded; it has the potential to improve healthcare, public safety, transportation, education, environment, manufacturing, communities and the overall quality of life. If what your organization seeks is to exploit the potential of data science to power your business models; then your next question is “How do I achieve that?”  And that’s the topic of…

For over 3 decades, my passion has been to assist organizations leverage the business potential of data and analytics and help them envision where and how data and analytics can generate new sources of customer, product and operational value. Maybe my fascination with data and analytics started in my youth with “Strat-o-Matic Baseball” but it certainly caught fire at Metaphor Computers in the 1980’s…

 Before I kick off this new blog, I’m happy to announce the release of my 3rd book” "The Art of Thinking Like A Data Scientist”. This book is designed to be a workbook – a pragmatic tool that you can use to help your organization leverage data and analytics to power your business and operational models. The book is jammed with templates, worksheets, examples and…

When trying to implement informed business solutions, what you see is all there is (WYSIATI), which can result in being “data-nearsighted.” For this reason, it is crucial to have a comprehensive data strategy in order to make better business decisions and implement efficient business solutions…

In “Importance of Thinking Differently…Hint: Don’t Pave the Cow Path”, I introduced the concept of the “3 Horizons of Digital Transformation.”  I wanted to provide a framework that helped organizations differentiate between “Digitalization” versus “Digital Transformation”.  Unfortunately, in succeeding client engagements, I realized I did a crappy job of explaining these 3…