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- Going Mobile: As federal agencies embrace devices and apps to meet employee demand, the White House seeks one comprehensive mobile strategy.
- Smartphone Security: The National Security Agency is developing technologies to make commercial devices suitable for intelligence work.
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Technology Whitepapers
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
Featured Reports
Featured Webcasts
- Maximize ROI with Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
- Effective IT Inventory and Asset Management: From Quagmire to Quick Fix
- Outsourcing Security: What Every Potential Cloud Security Customer Should Know
- The ABC's of Cloud Computing in the Midmarket
- Five Jobs You Can Do Better with Intelligent Decision Automation
Sentiment Tool Scans Twitter To Set Super Bowl Odds
January 27, 2012
Sentiment analysis is hot among financial-market traders, so why not for that other great betting domain, sports?
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Text-Analytics Demand Approaches $1 Billion
May 12, 2011
Brand-reputation management, market research, competitive intelligence, and customer-service needs have led to fast growth. Here what's driving interest.
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What I Look For In A Social Analysis Tool
March 16, 2011
There's growing demand to analyze Facebook, Twitter and other social media, but most tools fall short. Here are six capabilities to look for in next-generation products.
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Seven Breakthrough Sentiment Analysis Scenarios
February 17, 2011
Voice of the voter, voice of the customer and brand reputation management are just a few of the top applications for text analytics and information classification technologies.
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5 Paths To The New Data Integration
January 11, 2011
Embedded, automatic and easy new approaches meet growing demands for do-it-yourself data analysis.
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Five Ways To Fool A Twitter Sentiment Tool
December 16, 2010
Do sentiment-analysis tools pass the accuracy test? Here are five tests along with results using freely available products.
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Leading, Lagging And Lame BI And Data Warehousing Transformations
November 16, 2010
Lessons learned from attempts at innovation and renewal at Microsoft, Teradata, MicroStrategy and Actuate.
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The Content Problems Waiting To Be Solved
November 10, 2010
There's nothing like time constraints to focus a message, in the instance I'm reporting today, ten minutes for Lubor Ptacek, VP for Product Marketing at enterprise content management vendor Open Text, to give a run-down of The [Content] Problems Waiting To Be Solved. Here's my report...
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Smart Content, Online on a Social Platform Near You
November 03, 2010
You'd think the rise of the Social Net would mean the demise of "you had to be there," yet face-to-face still means stronger community and engagement. Being there still matters, but I can offer a next-best-thing, a social-enabled report on Smart Content, a recent content-analytics conference that I organized.
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Social Market Lessons in J.D. Power's Analytics Deals
October 22, 2010
Marketing-information provider J.D. Power this week announced agreements with social-media technology companies Clarabridge and NetBase, yet the company had acquired social-analytics start-up Umbria just 30 months ago for pretty much the same need. This week's announcement illustrates new directions for the larger social/voice-of-the-customer analytics market.
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Sociable BI: Could 'Tableau' Become a Verb?
September 27, 2010
Tableau visual data-analysis software embodies sociable BI, business intelligence that prizes accessibility, ease-of-use, and power, with a strong measure of collaboration and sharing, per Tableau Software's "Business Analytics For All" tag line. Does that mean that "Soon we'll say that we 'tableau' data the way we now say we 'google' for information"?
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Six Definitions of Smart Content
September 24, 2010
Smart Content is information, typically originating in "unstructured" formats, that is findable, reusable, more profitable for the producer, and more useful for the consumer. While technology facilitates smart content, it is business value -- not analytics, semantics, or XML storage -- that is central to industry experts' definitions, and to mine...
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Google Data, Statistics, and the Semanticized Web
September 20, 2010
I imagine that Google employs many hundreds of data scientists, folks whose job is to study and turn to good use the huge masses of data the search-advertising-application services giant, and its users, generate. Each document indexed, each search, each ad served, each service call creates data. This data is used to create a better Google: easier to use, faster, more accurate, effective, and functional, and yes, more profitable. Google Instant, out a couple of weeks ago, is a latest initiative toward these ends. I'm salivating (figuratively) at the thought of the new data it generates.
This article uses Google Instant as a jump-off point, so if you're not yet familiar with Instant, the video mashup Google Instant with Bob Dylan will show you how it works, worth 46 seconds of your time.
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Semantics and Analytics Unlock Value in Social and Online Content
September 08, 2010
Facebook, LinkedIn, Trip Advisor, and Twitter -- social media -- are almost incidental, replaceable tomorrow if another platform proves more attractive, powerful, and agile. It's content that is king, especially "smart content" that allows producers and consumers alike to find the greatest value in online and enterprise content.
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PowerPoint and Failure to Communicate
August 30, 2010
As a tool for communicating data-derived insights, PowerPoint comes up repeatedly, praised or under fire, reflecting the office software's ubiquity, adaptability, and unfortunate ease of misuse.
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Mobile BI, Situational Intelligence, and a Call-Out to SAP-Sybase
August 25, 2010
Mobile computing is a disruptor, a game-changer. Forward looking organizations, notably recently merged SAP and Sybase, have seen mobile's enterprise potential, including as a BI revolutionizer. Our vision should extend to situational intelligence, situational awareness coupled with interpretation of the users status, plans, and goals and enhanced with analysis of the user's social network...
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Expert Analysis: A Case for Socialization of Data
July 26, 2010
It's time to integrate social data, enterprise analytics and enterprise data for better social-media strategy.
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The Socialization of BI
July 20, 2010
As social computing matures, we see signs of a socialization of BI: Incorporation of social-media analysis into the BI toolkit, adaptation of social styles to BI processes, and development of BI tools that play nice on social platforms.
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My Feelings About Sentiment Analysis
June 29, 2010
Growth in visibility, acceptance, and adoption of automated sentiment-analysis solutions has been fueled by vendor innovations and by positive customer experiences, reports Elizabeth Glagowski in 1to1 magazine. Liz interviewed me for her article, and with her permission, I will share the full text of our exchange with readers...
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Beyond SQL, Knowledge-Seeking Queries
June 23, 2010
"Does anyone have a good example of a query that SQL can't do?" Fact is, 30+ years in, there are few queries that you can't implement with SQL. More-complex queries may rely on user-defined functions (UDFs), procedural extensions, or convoluted coding but may still fall short. So here's my beyond-SQL example -- "What are the 39 Steps?" -- by which I mean, knowledge-seeking queries.
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How to Define Accuracy in Analytics for Business
May 11, 2010
For information retrieval and analytics purposes, we need a broad definition of "accuracy."
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The Debate About Automated Sentiment Analysis
May 03, 2010
Attitudes toward automated sentiment analysis are changing as use cases and user stories are getting airplay Yet there are still techno-skeptic hold-outs. Debate helps, and a variety of voices have weighed in...
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Sentiment Analysis Feels Its Way Forward
April 30, 2010
A bit of controversy regarding sentiment analysis is playing out. A techno-skeptic blogger clique asserts that automated sentiment analysis is so inaccurate as to render automated methods worthless. Others differ with them: we like automation. Newly joining us are some of the skeptics' own kind, critics such as "Measurement Queen" K.D. Paine...
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Seven Questions for Teradata
April 28, 2010
I'm about to attend day two of Teradata's annual third-party industry influencers meeting. I'm grateful for the opportunity to listen, to voice my opinions, and, per the agenda distributed by analyst-relations manager extraordinaire Kim Dossey, to "Ask Any Question." I'll actually aim for seven. Here they are...
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It's Very Early in the Game for SAS Social Media Analytics
April 19, 2010
The flash and splash of last week's SAS Social Media Analytics (SMA) launch belies the apparent very early, incomplete state of the service. The dashboard interface is attractive, but the application is nonetheless narrowly focused and inflexible, an analytics silo with no out-of-the-box integration with enterprise systems.
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Can Sentiment Analysis Help Companies Tap New Markets?
April 08, 2010
"Can sentiment analysis help companies tap new markets?" This question was posed to me by Joab Jackson, an astute IT industry watcher. My answer: Find new customers, yes. Find new segments of customers, not on its own and not without some creativity. Let's explore a few scenarios...
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Expert Analysis: Is Sentiment Analysis an 80% Solution?
March 29, 2010
Sentiment-analysis technologies aren't perfect. But what critics are missing is the value of automation, the inaccuracy of human assessment, and the many applications that require only "good-enough" accuracy.
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Is It Time For NoETL?
March 24, 2010
I've been bemused by NoSQL, the movement that propounds database-management diversity. Is it now similarly time for a NoETL movement, reflecting a new world of liberated, semantically enriched, analysis-ready, mashable data?
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Open Text Buying Nstein, TechCrunch Misreports
February 23, 2010
Enterprise content management vendor Open Text's planned acquisition of ECM + text-mining provider Nstein is significant text-analytics/publishing/content-management news. It gained the attention of TechCrunch, which managed to misreport the story. Here's my analysis of the news with a look at TechCrunch's mis-telling...
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The GATE Way to Open Source Text Analytics
February 18, 2010
Hamish Cunningham is benevolent dictator of the GATE team, "researching human language computation." Their work is realized in a highly capable, open-source, text-analysis platform, the General Architecture for Text Engineering. Hamish's replies to my questions regarding Text Analytics Opportunities and Challenges for 2010 hold many insights about text analytics and open source...
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Open Source Choices
February 16, 2010
Open source was Best Supporting Actor in the 2010 Editors' Choice Awards. It plays an important part -- in some cases, a star turn -- for 4 of The Dozen top-category winners and for 11 of the 36 Ones to Watch. Noting that the awards reflect both current impact and our expectations, clearly open source has reached a new level of enterprise importance and promise.
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Clarabridge Asks, Are You Customer Experienced?
February 05, 2010
Add "customer" to Jimi Hendrix' song title and you have a question central to last week's Clarabridge Customer Connections (C3) conference, Are You Customer Experienced?
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Visualize Balance, Visualize Change
February 03, 2010
The best BI visualizations bring out essential information that might otherwise remain hidden in data. A Washington Post visualization of President Obama's proposed $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2011 does just that. There's much to be learned from a New York Times example as well, in particular about visualizing change.
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Semantic Search Footnotes: Concepts, Ontologies & Real Time
January 31, 2010
I want to respond to a few comments/suggestions I received about my recent Intelligent Enterprise story, Breakthrough Analysis: Two + Nine Types of Semantic Search. Jim Hendler suggested a semantic-search approach I'd missed, "real-time search with some sort of filtering." I'll tackle that and points raised by NLP/semantics researcher Tom O'Hara...
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Sentiment Analysis, Enterprise Content, and Social Media, Year 2010
January 26, 2010
Sentiment analysis is one of the most challenging and one of the most interesting uses of text technologies. Application areas include customer satisfaction and support, marketing, financial markets, media and publishing, and politics and policy. That's why I've created a new conference, the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, slated for April 13 in New York...
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Breakthrough Analysis: Two + Nine Types of Semantic Search
January 21, 2010
There's more to it than offering related results. Here are 11 approaches that join semantics to search.
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Distorted Netflix Rental Data, Online at NYTimes.com
January 11, 2010
I'd like to like the New York Times's on-line visualization, "A Peek Into Netflix Queues." I'm a big fan of the paper and its infographics, but in the end, Netflix visualization strikes me as glitzy rather than informative, a misleading graphical tarting up of incomplete data. I will explain where Netflix and the Times went wrong...
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Eleven BI/Analytics Topics for 2010
December 30, 2009
This time of year, we pundit types like to post our summations of the past year's developments, our Best Of lists recapping our own work, and our industry predictions for next year, for 2010. Not me, not this year. I will, however, post on the year ahead... for me, on BI and analytics topics that I plan to cover in the next few months...
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Google and the Meaning of Half Open
December 22, 2009
Google is half open: the conclusion I draw after reading product management SVP Jonathan Rosenberg's "The Meaning of Open." For all the pride and confidence and even wisdom conveyed in the essay, Google's core, its strategic direction -- Rosenberg's own product management brief -- is rightly closed rather than community-driven.
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BI or Analytics? "'T ain't what you do..."
December 11, 2009
There was yet another "What's the definition of analytics?" exchange on-line today prompted by a software vendor's claim to be "beyond BI" or the like... My response: "'T ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it." Let's talk value, not feature lists...
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The Myth of 360 Degree Views
November 30, 2009
We've all encountered the promise of 360-degree customer views, marketing-speak that asserts that BI solution X, CRM solution Y, or Sales Force Automation solution Z considers customer information from all angles. Yet I've never seen the "360-degree" claim fulfilled. Here's my take on 360-degree views and how they can finally becoming reality...
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Text Data Quality: Mistakes and More
November 25, 2009
I wrote recently on Text Data Quality, looking at issues that affect analytical accuracy, that "the basic text data quality issue is that humans make mistakes, and the challenge is that people's natural-language mistakes defy easy, automated detection." This topic and related non-erroneous vagaries of human language bear further exploration...
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True BI for the Masses
November 16, 2009
BI for the Masses is overused marketing-speak meant to suggest that Vendor X's break-out Product Y is going to enable/deliver business intelligence beyond the 15%-20% of knowledge workers who currently do BI. Well, I have my own notion of BI for the Masses, and it is NOT what it's typically claimed to be. What it is is illustrated by a couple of recent New York Times data visualizations...
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Commercial and Community Open Source and Pentaho BI
October 22, 2009
Last week, I offered the opinion that BI software publisher Pentaho has moved beyond a commercial open source business model. While what counts most is great, affordable software, an understanding of market trends helps everyone concerned make strategic choices. In this spirit, I'll present perspectives that complement mine, from Pentaho and from the Pentaho community...
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Open Source Decision Time for Pentaho BI
October 12, 2009
For BI software publisher Pentaho, the demise of as-a-service BI provider LucidEra created an opportunity that was too good to pass up. LucidEra's Clearview interface, acquired and rebranded Pentaho Analyzer, fills a product-line gap. But is Pentaho, founded as a "commercial open source" BI vendor, still defined by open source? Pentaho itself seems unsure.
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Visual BI Meets Pop Culture
October 06, 2009
BI has crossed a cultural threshold. Data visualization forms have become a tool of pop culture. Witness a pseudo-infographic published in the New York Times. The BI forms are there, absent the usual, numerical BI content. "He Came, He Heard, He Shared" subverts familiar chart forms to deliver social/media commentary. It's postmodern BI...
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Recovery.gov Double Fault: Broken Data Feeds
October 02, 2009
The relaunched recovery.gov site no longer supports automated data feeds. These feeds had allowed users of the 1.0 site to perform valued-added analyses, "the whole point of accountability and transparency" according one site user, who added, "from a software architecture standpoint, they seem to have missed a key principle here: backward compatibility."
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Relaunched Recovery.gov Fails Accessibility Standards
September 30, 2009
Recovery.gov, a showcase government-transparency Web site that relaunched on Monday, fails to meet U.S. federal government Section 508 accessibility standards. The non-compliance issues relate to display of data tables despite on-site compliance claims. Sharron Rush of accessibility-advocacy organization Knowbility goes so far as to state, "The recovery.gov Web site is a good example of what NOT to do for accessibility in my opinion."
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Twitter Stirs Up the Analyst Industry
September 23, 2009
Every Twitter user gets the same on-site visibility and capabilities. As a result, celebrities excluded, authority chez Twitter derives from your network and from your tweets and only after that from your biography and employment. Since open publishing is an independent-analyst ethos, we independents have taken to wide-open Twitter like, well, whales to the air...
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Questions and Answers about USAspending.gov
September 08, 2009
My blog article on USAspending.gov's design flaws has attracted record page views, boosted by coverage on Slashdot, Government Computer News, and other outlets. Posted comments reveal many misconceptions about the site. I'll distill the more interesting ones, with some of my own, into a series of questions. Noting that "government should be collaborative," I'll attempt answers myself...
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