Cause Analytics

09/01/2016

Why Real Innovation Will Not Come From Within Your Own Industry

Peter Hinssen interviews technology futurist, start-up founder and a fintech industry expert Brett King about disruption, the shrinking workforce, corporate culture, start-ups, transparency and the skills...

03/01/2016

Asking, "What could cause you to change your mind?", is a simple way to reduce your odds of becoming a victim of strategic surprise in 2016.

22/10/2014

Dan Durrant:

Breaking free of your comfort zone

Some good pointers in this piece. Talk to new people. Seek new perspectives. Be open to discovery!

I like this excerpt:
Habitual thinking is the brain's way to be efficient, but it also tends to keep you in your comfort zone. If you know what works one time, your brain starts to recognize this and create more defined neural pathways that allow you to almost unconsciously create an efficient action.

20/10/2014

Salesforce Wear opens wearable CRM market, cool

Salesforce is said to be making a "bold and well-timed" move into the "wearables space". In their lineup of supported devices are the Epson Moverio, Jawbone UP, Vuzix M100, Meta Spaceglasses, and Oculus Rift join Pebble, Samsung Gear, Google Glass, Moto360, Myo, and Bionym Nymi band. Some highlights from the article:

Salesforce revealed that FacialNetwork, a HospitalityID app, allows customer service reps wearing smart glasses to identify guests using instant facial recognition technology. . . .
ClickSoftware’s ShiftExpert app leverages Samsung Gear II smartwatches to enable employees to clock in and out from shifts, automatically entering the data into timesheets – and sending reminder notifications if the worker is in danger of being late for a shift. . . .
Proximity Insight’s app for Android Wear smartwatches alerts workers when a VIP has come into physical range, allowing retail employees to greet the customer right away.



Posted by David Pidsley with Dan Durrant

Cause Analytics is here to help you navigate through Business Intelligence, understand today's challenges and tomorrow's technologies.

www.CauseAnalytics.com

http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/a9dH/51da26c0

Salesforce’s entry into the wearables space has been both bold and well-timed.

19/10/2014

The Future Of AI Will Be Stacked

Rick Collins, the president for enterprise business at Next IT, argues that the the race to create an "all-encompassing virtual personal assistant project (VPA)" such as Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Watson, and even new entrants like Viv , are driving the AI experience in the wrong direction for enterprises. Why? Because, "for an AI to truly function at the enterprise level, it will require such deep integration with company knowledge, and even proprietary information and data, that the experience necessitates control of the VPA by the company." He suggests that companies should be able to build AI stacks one day, in the same way they build their CRM or marketing stacks.



Posted by Dan Durrant w/ David Pidsley

Cause Analytics is here to help you navigate through Business Intelligence, understand today's challenges and tomorrow's technologies.

www.CauseAnalytics.com

http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/a8Vz/51da26c0

We are entering an exciting period for Artificial Intelligence. We’re seeing more consumer impacting developments and breakthroughs in AI technology than..

19/10/2014

Salesforce to unleash Wave - The Analytics Cloud

For all of you who were wondering if Salesforce was going to be left out of the "big data boom", Marc Benioff, a Salesforce co-founder and the company’s chief executive, has been tweeting about Wave. Here's more details from NYTimes (excerpt):

Wave is intended to create sales, service and marketing analytics, either in packaged or custom forms, which can be read on desktop and mobile devices. It is meant to stress the data within Salesforce products, but it is also possible to import third-party information from companies like Microsoft, SAP and Informatica, as well as machine-generated data. . .
Right now, Tableau is one of the few notable companies making it easier to visualize data. Given the millions of customers using Salesforce, in other words, it is the kind of thing that could attract independent software developers to build products on it. . .
"It’s been quite a while since we announced a new market this big,” Mr. Dayon [Alex Dayon, the president of products at Salesforce] said. “Analytics is a $42 billion industry, and people need a new cloud-based platform for it.”



Posted by Dan Durrant with David Pidsley

Cause Analytics is here to help you navigate through Business Intelligence, understand today's challenges and tomorrow's technologies.

www.CauseAnalytics.com

http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/a8Dp/51da26c0

Salesforce.com will not be left out of the big data boom, and it's hitting it in a way that suits its mainstream customers, with less overt math and lots more pretty pictures. The product's official name is Wave, the Analytics Cloud, and Salesforce is introducing it at the start of Dreamforce, ...

16/10/2014

Data Storytelling for Disruptors
Disruptive innovations have become common in these 'postnormal' times. Organisations that seek to be disruptive are fusing big data analytics with storytelling to nurture better business cultures. Narratives and data stories encourage participation in innov...

http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/a3Ni/51da26c0

16/10/2014

http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/a3Nj/51da26c0

09/10/2014

The Storytelling Mandate of Big Data

Excerpt:
We collect data and use data effectively to enhance our experiences and tell stories, says Ramesh Jain, a UC Irvine professor and big data researcher. “But this requires understanding relationships among disparate data items. And that is where the importance of Big Data really lies,” Jain writes on his blog.

Data-powered storytelling can be broken down into two categories: micro stories and macro stories. In their 2013 piece on the topic, Jain and Microsoft researcher Malcolm Stanley theorize that micro stories can be as simple as clicking the “like” button on Facebook, posting a picture on Instagram, or posting a video on YouTube. “Micro stories reflect a person’s experience with just one small event–really a moment in the event,” they write.

Mega stories can be generated by combining micro stories into a bigger narrative. “Mega stories tell a story that could only be created by considering a large volume of relevant events in big data,” Jain and Stanley write. “All these events must be selected and aggregated based on the goal of the storyteller.”



Posted by Dan Durrant

Cause Analytics is here to help you navigate through Business Intelligence, understand today's challenges and tomorrow's technologies.

www.CauseAnalytics.com

http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/9TEa/51da26c0

Data has become a natural resource, pouring from every nook and cranny in our digital universe. But data by itself is useless, requiring humans or machines

09/10/2014

Defining

Excerpt:
May 2012 danah boyd and Kate Crawford publish “Critical Questions for Big Data” in Information, Communications, and Society. They define big data as “a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of: (1) Technology: maximizing computation power and algorithmic accuracy to gather, analyze, link, and compare large data sets. (2) Analysis: drawing on large data sets to identify patterns in order to make economic, social, technical, and legal claims. (3) Mythology: the widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy.”
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878

Posted by Dan Durrant

Cause Analytics is here to help you navigate through Business Intelligence, understand today's challenges and tomorrow's technologies.

www.CauseAnalytics.com

http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/9SM2/51da26c0

The story of how data became big starts many years before the current buzz around big data. Already seventy years ago we encounter the first attempts to quantify the growth rate in the volume of data or what has popularly been known as the “information explosion” (a term first used in 1941, [...]

08/10/2014

Balancing the Big “I” and the little “I” of Innovation

Excerpt:
Many of us think of Innovation as that cool, new, never been done before breakthrough that completely changes the landscape of a business, its products, or the dynamics of the market. By that definition, we are referring to the Big “I” of innovation, and if successful, it can be an enormous win. These breakthrough or disruptive innovations are high risk and high return, and typically mid to long-term initiatives. It is because of the big payoff that companies should invest in these types of initiatives.

The incremental changes or improvements to businesses and products are known as the little “i” of innovation. While they are not quite as groundbreaking as the Breakthroughs, they are certainly powerful and profitable. Short-term innovations are typically focused on exploiting or optimizing existing business. They bring short-term revenue, increased efficiency, and cost-savings, which are important to keep the company going.

Having a balanced innovation portfolio is crucial to the success of your organization. Innovation has to bring tangible results and a competitive advantage to the organization by generating new revenue or reducing costs. Therefore you need a constant pipeline of new ideas, for a sustainable competitive advantage that provide short- and long-term benefits.



Posted by Dan Durrant

Cause Analytics is here to help you navigate through Business Intelligence, understand today's challenges and tomorrow's technologies.

www.CauseAnalytics.com

http://click-to-read-mo.re/p/9SmX/51da26c0