A pretty big day for #wa and #analytics in terms of interdisciplinary convergence

It’s a pretty cryptic tweet, yes.

A paper was published in the Journal Marketing Science that just came to my attention. A review will be forthcoming on the Web Analytics Association website. I’ll publish the link once I write it.

The article in question is very theoretical and mathematical, but it leverages an area of mathematics that has yet to be applied, practically, to web analytics. What’s most exciting is that the physical technology to make it happen exists. The case study that it works is there.

The one sentence summary is: “There’s a way to radically increase the tempo of optimization while drastically lowering both the monetary and personhour cost”.

Now the bad news:

The social technology is another question.

It requires an interdisciplinary team of web analysts/marketing scientists, data miners/marketing scientists, information architects, technologists, and creatives. These five groups are going to have to work together to realize the full competitive advantages offered by the physical technology. In many ways, the social pathways simply don’t exist within most companies to take advantage of the technology. The technology will move faster than traditional human institutions will be able to keep up.

Yes, we will all start off very small to start with. But these things grow.

As it is now, anways, I don’t think there is nearly enough interdisciplinary chatter to fully leverage the technology.

Therein lies the competitive advantage.

Profit to the people capable of overcoming their disciplinary barriers: replete with all their inherent jargon, prejudices and cannon.