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…

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…

I love watching the NBA’s Golden State Warriors play basketball. Their offensive “improvisation” is a thing of beauty in their constant ball movement in order to find the “best” shot. They are a well-oiled machine optimizing split-second decisions in an ever-changing landscape that is heavily influenced by questions such as:

• Who is my defender?
• What are the strengths of my defender?
• From where is help likely to come if I make a move to the basket?
• Who…

Do you old schoolers remember the Shimmer Floor Waxcommercial from the early (and best) days of the TV show “Saturday Night Live”?  In case folks don’t remember (because we are old) or never saw it (because you’re too uncool), the Shimmer Floor Wax commercial asked the question: “Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping?”…

Wait, the AI advantage is already here and gone? 

That’s what Deloitte warns in their report “Future in the balance? How countries are pursuing an AI advantage”.A noteworthy quote:

“There are indications that the window for competitive differentiation with AI is rapidly closing. As AI technologies become easier to consume and get embedded in…

Imagine…imagine that you have been challenged to play Steph Curry, the greatest 3-point shooter in the history of the National Basketball Association, in a game of 1x1.  Yea, a pretty predictable outcome for 99.9999999% of us.

But now image that Steph Curry has to wear a suit of knight’s armor as part of that 1x1 game.  The added weight, the obstructed vision, and the lack of flexibility, agility and mobility would probably allow even the average basketball…

In my previous blog “How DevOps Drives Analytics Operationalization and Monetization”, I discussed the critical and complementary role of DevOps to operationalize and monetize the analytics that came out of the Data Science development process. While the combination of Design Thinking and Data Science accelerate the creation of more effective, more…

I recently wrote a blog "Interweaving Design Thinking and Data Science to Unleash Economic Value of Data"  that discussed the power of interweaving Design Thinking and Data Science to make our analytic efforts more effective.  Our approach was validated by a recentMcKinsey article titled “Fusing data and…

Digital capabilities leverage customer, product and operational insights to digitally transform business models.  And nowhere is this more evident than the rush by industrial companies to digitally transform consumption models by transitioning from selling products to selling [capabilities]-as-a-service (thusly, Xaas).  For example:

• The key issue for the airlines is to maximize their core revenue generating mechanisms:flight scheduling and the hours…

Moo…

There is this very intriguing Enterprise Car Rental commercial on TV (I’m old school and still watch my commercials on a television) that shows a glimpse into future driving behaviors enabled by autonomous vehicles (see Figure 1).…

In many of my presentations and lectures, I have made the following declaration:

In Big Data, it isn’t the volume of data that’s interesting, it’s the granularity; it’s the ability to build detailed analytic or behavioral profiles on every human and every device that ultimately drives monetization.

Ever-larger volumes of aggregated data enable organizations to spot trends – what products are hot, what movies or TV shows are trendy, what restaurants or destinations are…

I had the great fortune to sit on an Ericsson-Wired Magazine panel with some outstanding thought leaders to debate the ramifications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.  We debated whether the era was a revolution or just an evolution (I argued revolution because it will force organizations to think differently about their business and operational models) and whether IoT had failed so far (I said that to date it had “under-performed” from a business value…

Did you ever have a concept that you knew was right, but just couldn’t find the right words to articulate that concept?  Okay, well welcome to my nightmare.  I know that Data Science and Design Thinking share many common characteristics including the power of “might” (i.e., that “might” be a better predictor of performance), “learning through failing” (which is the only way to determine where the edges of the solution really reside), and the innovation liberation…

The Big Data craze caught fire with a provocative declaration that “Data is the New Oil”; that data will fuel the economic growth in the 21^stcentury in much the same way that oil fueled the economic growth of the 20^thcentury.  The “New Oil” analogy was a great way to contextualize the economic value of data; to give the Big Data conversation an easily recognizable face.  The Economist recently declared data “…

Describing the Data Science analytics development process has always been a struggle for me.  The corporate world is full of linear processes.  Major monolithic enterprise applications – ERP, MRP, SFA, CRM systems – have been architected to reduce operational complexity via a series of interlocking, heavily-engineered (and re-engineered) linear processes (though I suspect that anyone who has survived an SAP ERP implementation would take issue with my “reduce…

Nothing like a devastating catastrophe to bring a bit of reality into the world of IoT and data science.  The recent crashes of the new Boeing 737 Max have been attributed to a single point of failure – a sensor – in the design of the complex navigation system[1]. 

To summarize the situation:

• Boeing’s new 737 MAX included larger, more efficient engines than the previous generation and as such, the engines were…