A smoothly running sensor data analytics tool may be just as difficult to manage as a symphony orchestra. Because every musician in an orchestra – and every part of an IoT system – needs to work properly and ‘harmonize’ with the others. But how do conductors make their orchestras work so nicely and sound so heavenly instead of creating a mismanaged cacophony? Obviously, there’s a lot of practice involved. But besides that, they definitely know what pitfalls they need to avoid. Which is why,…

In the “Ecology of Metrics,” I wrote about “alignment” being a type of metric; alignment can measure the extent to which an organization’s supply or capacity is matched against the demands or needs of the market.  For instance, in a call centre, it would be highly desirable to have agents available to respond to calls at “precisely” the same time that clients are making calls.  If alignment is off even by only 15 to 30 seconds, impatient clients might hang up and never call again.  Similarly…

One of the first things we do after launching a website nowadays is connect to Google Analytics. A little bit down the road we’ll connect more “out-of-box” analytics tools to calculate funnels, retention, A/B tests, and more.

These tools are great and work fine until a company gets bigger and analytics requirements get more sophisticated. It’s time to set up a data infrastructure, which means selecting a data collection tool, ETL tool, data warehouse, and BI tool on top of…

We’re obviously in an age of unprecedented access to customer insights and information, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to gather and leverage data. Businesses – small businesses, in particular – must be very strategic with the information they collect and how they go about procuring it.

Data collection and analysis takes time, so it would be a shame to focus on the wrong information.

Five Different Ways to Collect…

In this blog, I will be considering theory developments from changes in methodology. But first I want to express an opinion on the significance of using numbers. A "number" represents an amplitude or magnitude: 5 pencils; 13 paperclips; 50 sheets of paper. The purpose of these numbers is to facilitate the counting of things that are presumably the same in a specific way: e.g. all 5 pencils are in fact pencils - for if 1 were an eraser, there would be 4 pencils and 1 eraser. The use of…

Search any data related posting and you’ll soon be up to your eyeballs in reports on the promise of the new data era, techniques to help build a better data engine or incorporate new data widgets, and infographics and visualizations showing the kinds of insights you can get with the right mix of techniques.

Got it. Data is big. It’s expected to grow in volume to 35 to 45 zetabytes by 2020. As in seven sets of three zeros big.

It’s also transforming business processes big.…

When we talk about understand what a business requires to improve and upscale their operations, it is widely recognized that there is a need to integrate data integration in real time. If we take the example of a retail business, it is necessary that we understand just how and to what level performance reports and field data inputs can be utilized to improve upon an existing business. A business’ success depends…

I find that different types of surveys represent a large source of data for many organizations: client questionnaires; recruitment interviews; incident debriefings; interrogations; borehole drilling surveys; quality control checks; marketing surveys; security and patrol logs; and inventory audits. I believe that for many people, the idea of collecting information using surveys makes sense; and they recognize the need for the data. Problems arise in relation to the transition from survey to…

Companies are fighting tooth and nail to stay ahead of the competition. Besides deploying aggressive market campaigns, they are focusing on increasing their dependency on research in order to understand market competition and trends. The changing market dynamics entails closer look at various aspects connected to the data.

The market research aims at giving business organizations information about customers or markets for making informed business decisions. This effort to collect…

When I talk about "the institutional response," I am referring to an increasingly common occurrence: a standardized or large-scale approach is supported, promoted, and applied by a particular institution - sometimes governmental in nature - premised on its apparent suitability or superiority to achieve desirable outcomes. I suspect that in recent years, there has been a push to get citizens to file their income tax returns electronically. I know that in Canada, it has become difficult…

If you’re planning on a data driven approach, you’re going to need data, most likely from a nice mix of sources that will give you the right amount of insight you need to make it worthwhile.



But if you’re not careful, you can quickly spend a lot of money getting it whether it’s “free” or not. Because as much as we’d like it to be, most of it is definitely not free, even if it is on an open and…

 Observational social media research 

involves analyzing social media data without intervention or interaction from the researcher.  In this mode of research, you search for, look at, collect, synthesize, and analyze data that exist in the social media sphere (blogs, newsgroups, forums, message boards, and microblogs).  The goal is to measure…