Someone asked, at the Digital Strategy Conference Vancouver, what the top 3 analytics tools were. Repeating the answer here: 3. The Bullet Point It’s a powerful communication device. Keep it short. Because people read short bulleted lists. 2. A statistical tool, like R or something else, that can tell you about the relationships among the variables. Understanding the relationships among variables is important for making many decisions. Most tools can’t see outside themselves; or tell you anything about the relationship among variables. R is free; others are not. 1. Your own brain. You use it to understand the world. You use it to make decisions. There is, as of yet, no substitute tool on the market for your own brain.  

This is Big Data Week in Toronto. I’ll be delivering a case study on the business value of that data, but on a rather small, but beautifully complex, dataset on Monday. Big Data has now just become a marketing term. Those who have put in the effort, and read the three or four HBR articles on the subject, know more than 80% of the population. If you’ve read up on some of the applications involved, you’re ahead of 95%. If you read this, you’re ahead of 99.99% of the population. So, there’s an incentive to read on. What is Big Data? A good definition of Big Data is anything that is generally too big to fit in the memory of[…]