CYBAEA Journal – Make money from data

Employer NI on pensions would hit independent schools harder than most businesses

Rumours abound that the budget could introduce National Insurance (NI) on employer pensions contributions. If true, this would further add to the pressures on the sector.

4 min

Independent Schools

Business

It is a turbulent time for the independent school sector in the UK, with schools facing rising financial pressures from increasing staff costs and disruption from the…

Allan Engelhardt

Oct 25, 2024

Consultants’ only job, and why hard decisions are easy

Weeknotes for 2024W10

2 min

weeknotes

2024

A multinational company was scammed out of $25.6 million by hackers who fooled employees at the company’s Hong Kong branch into believing their digital recreation of its…

Allan Engelhardt

Mar 9, 2024

I am done with virtual (I think)

Weeknotes for 2024W09

2 min

weeknotes

2024

I attended the TBD Conference and learnt that I have no appetite for virtual conferences any more. Not even one as good as TBD. Or, perhaps: especially not one as good as TBD.

Allan Engelhardt

Mar 2, 2024

A good week for learning

Weeknotes for 2024W08

2 min

weeknotes

2024

This was a good week for learning.

Allan Engelhardt

Feb 25, 2024

Inifite landscapes, being present, listening

Weeknotes for 2024W07

1 min

weeknotes

2024

I think I will take a break from Weeknotes until I find an alternative to Quarto for the website, as mentioned last week.

Allan Engelhardt

Feb 17, 2024

Time, meet love

Weeknotes for 2024W06

2 min

weeknotes

2024

Never sell what you do. Sell the outcome of what you do. Source

Allan Engelhardt

Feb 10, 2024

The need for speed

Weeknotes for 2024W05

3 min

weeknotes

2024

Last week I moaned that Quarto was too slow for blogs. Can Hugo rescue me?

Allan Engelhardt

Feb 3, 2024

On strikes, upgrades, and other delays

Weeknotes for 2024W04

2 min

weeknotes

2024

Rescheduled team away-day in London next week due to train strikes - bummed; it would have been great to get together.

Allan Engelhardt

Jan 27, 2024

How can you be more theatrical in your job?

Weeknotes for 2024W03

4 min

weeknotes

2024

Eleven meetings in one day, and that is after I had cancelled two.

Allan Engelhardt

Jan 20, 2024

Ancient + magician + illumniati + freemason = consultant expert advisor

Weeknotes for 2024W02

4 min

weeknotes

2024

Thought much about data used for AI models, especially large language models

Allan Engelhardt

Jan 13, 2024

On paradoxes and personal development

Weeknotes for 2024W01

2 min

weeknotes

2024

Short week, so an obligatory “Happy New Year” to you all.

Allan Engelhardt

Jan 6, 2024

The future of general insurance pricing

Allan Engelhardt at expert panel at the Institute and Factulty of Actuaries

4 min

Insurance

GLM

Allan Engelhardt was part of the expert panel of speakers at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries event titled What is the new GLM? - GI pricing for the world of machine…

Allan Engelhardt

Jul 20, 2023

Launching Data Navigator: the essential benchmarking tool for independent schools

Building large scale R Shiny applications and deploying on docker

2 min

Sector:Education

R-Shiny

Most of our team at Barnett Waddingham spent the first seven months of 2023 building and launching Data Navigator for Schools (DN4S). This is a large application built using…

Allan Engelhardt

Jul 11, 2023

How NHBC revolutionised its approach to data analytics

What if you could increase the profitability of your organisation simply by changing the way your teams create new insights from data and communicate information?

Allan Engelhardt writes on the Barnett Waddingham blog about a case study. Working with NHBC, a nationwide, independent provider of warranty and insurance for new homes, we…

Allan Engelhardt

Sep 16, 2021

Demonstrating the commercial value of data with Mazda Motor Europe

Creating the business case for investing in data and analytics

Allan Engelhardt writes on the Barnett Waddingham blog about a case study. Working with the retail financial services arm of Mazda Motor Europe (MME), we were able to create…

Allan Engelhardt

Sep 1, 2021

Using actuarial science to achieve high-impact profits

Cost of sales analysis on integrated data unlocks £ millions benefits

Allan Engelhardt and Harshil Shah writes on the Barnett Waddingham blog about a case study. Working with a FTSE250 global hotel chain, we integrated data across the…

Allan Engelhardt, Harshil Shah

Jun 22, 2021

Evolving your Employer DNA

Effective communications re-imagining the future

Allan Engelhardt and Jane Ralph chats with the wonderful Tom Cheesewright about how the working environment is changing and how operating models will be challenged as…

Allan Engelhardt, Jane Ralph, Tom Cheesewright

May 25, 2021

Covid-19 and predictive models: transitioning to a new normal

The past is no longer a good prediction of the future, simply because the present is so different from the past.

2 min

Covid-19

analytics

Allan Engelhardt and Wan Heah writes on the Barnett Waddingham blog about the challenges of keeping predictive models current and relevant during periods of rapid change.

Allan Engelhardt, Wan Hsien Heah

Jun 23, 2020

Allan Engelhardt joins Barnett Waddingham

Providing a unique platform to enhance our offerings

1 min

people

Barnett Waddingham announces that our Allan Engelhardt has joined the firm to set up and lead Management Decision Analytics, a new service offering supporting companies in…

Allan Engelhardt

May 29, 2019

Game ⚽n

Winning against sales leakage with Customer Experience

1 min

Gaming

Gambling

In this webinar, Henrik Janér, Neil Wilson, and Allan Engelhardt share their experiences of customer experience (CX) transformation with case studies from the Gaming and…

Allan Engelhardt, Henrik Janer, Neil Wilson

Feb 19, 2019

9 Customer Experience priorities for the new year

5 min

CXA

CEM

What are your Customer Experience (CX) priorities for the new year? If you have to pick one thing that you would most want to achieve, what would it be? Name it, claim it…

Dec 26, 2018

CX Economics Part 2

The new value drivers for the Customer Experience business case

Customer Experience (CX) has become a critical capability for companies in many industries. We previously looked at how CX has become a core enterprise capability and the 6…

Nov 28, 2018

CX Economics Part 1

The 6 classic value drivers for the Customer Experience business case

Customer Experience (CX) is now seen as a mission-critical enterprise capability. Witness the recent (November 2018) acquisition by SAP, perhaps the best known enterprise…

Nov 26, 2018

3 CX priorities for 8 company cultures

5 min

CXA

Culture

Customer Experience (CX) initiatives often have a strong focus on changing the corporate culture. And rightly so. But culture is hard and we have found it useful to consider…

Nov 10, 2018

CX Conversations: Are yours unhelpful?

2 min

CXA

Cassandra Goodman makes a passionate plea for Customer Experience (CX) leaders to focus on what matters: improving the business through better customer- and employee…

Nov 1, 2018

Towards Data Value Management

Do you think of data as an asset? Do you account for it as such?

In 2005, we asked the leading mobile company to list their biggest assets. We challenged the answer and encouraged them to think about their customer base as an asset.…

Aug 4, 2017

Big Data Fail

For 70% of companies, ‘Big Data’ fail to generate returns above the cost of capital

6 min

business

Big Data

For 70% of companies, ‘Big Data’ fail to generate returns above the cost of capital. This is bad, doubly so because the data is from the telecommunications industry which…

Jul 17, 2017

Commercial churn impact from limited data

Many organizations worry Do we have enough data to gain insights and take meaningful commercial action? The short answer is ‘yes’. The long answer is ‘almost certainly yes’.…

Jun 26, 2017

Training dates for Marketing Analytics course announced

Classes 3-7 July 2017: We have updated our very popular training course to take advantage of the latest Microsoft Advanced Analytics technology and re-launched it as…

May 31, 2017

Journey to profits: valuing the customer experience success story

5.5% immediate growth from tactical CX actions

What is the value of a good customer experience? From decades of experience, we usually quote around 20% EBITDA growth for companies who have a strategic focus and strong…

May 27, 2017

Google loves us 100%

3 min

seo

Google loves us 100%. At least that is what the PageSpeed Insights tool tells us for both Mobile and Desktop. And since we are currently promoting our popular Marketing…

May 26, 2017

Oil and Data: Downstream Data Science

CYBAEA are the downstream data scientists

2 min

business

data science

Data is the new oil, gushes The Economist in their 6 May 2017 edition. Just like oil fuelled a fast growing economy, so data is the power behind the current economy. Well…

May 26, 2017

Under pressure, discover opportunity: Customer success story

Facing stricter regulation and low growth, Bupa Global, the ~£1bn revenues provider of international health insurance, looked for opportunities to acquire and serve new…

May 8, 2017

Explorers and farmers: What is a ‘Data Scientist’?

6 min

data

business

I am not sure the term ‘Data Scientist’ means anything anymore. As often happens with new buzzwords, they take on a life of their own and the original meaning becomes…

Mar 27, 2017

Bringing dinosaurs back to life: the future of insurance

The Economist has two articles on the future of Insurance. The first article estimates that the US general (P&C) insurance industry had a combined ratio of 100.3% in 2016…

Mar 13, 2017

What is wrong with lift curves

The first part of our Marketing Analytics Using R course covers campaign analysis with test- and control groups and campaign optimisation using lift curves and predicted…

Oct 31, 2016

How do we know that marketing works?

8 min

marketing

business

How do we know that marketing works? It was National Poetry Day in Britain recently, and I do believe that poetry and imagination, and the wisdom and insights it can bring…

Oct 17, 2016

Marketing Analytics Using R Training Course 31 October - 04 November 2016

Back by poular demand!

The Customer Insight function as a growth engine

Consumer-facing companies in developed economies have experienced little or no growth since the global recession of 2008 and 2009. This is the damning introduction to a…

Aug 30, 2016

Microsoft Analytics in 2016

9 min

business

technology

If you had asked me two years ago if Microsoft was a serious vendor for data science and analytics infrastructure and tools, I would have laughed. At the time their offering…

Jun 24, 2016

Net Promoter Score confidence intervals 2: maths and stats

10 min

NPS

statistics

We looked at a rule of thumb for confidence intervals and what that means for a business manager in our previous post. Now we do the maths, stats, and R code for the…

Jan 15, 2016

R in Insurance 2016

1 min

insurance

event

The 2016 conference on R in Insurance will be held on Monday 11 July 2016. This year we are back at Cass Business School in London, UK. This is the fourth time the…

Jan 6, 2016

Net Promoter Score confidence intervals

6 min

NPS

statistics

How many responses do you need in order to have an accurate measure of the Net Promoter Score? What is the confidence interval on your score? Do you really know if it has…

Jan 4, 2016

Analytics for Marketing online training 25 - 28 September 2012

I am excited to be giving the Analytics for Marketing online training course on 25-28 September 2012. Sign up before 25 August 2012 for the early bird discount.

Aug 1, 2012

When Big Data matters

<Big can be a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference. The gas in the ill-fated Hindenburg airship, the gas that formed our Sun, and the gas that formed the Milky…

Mar 21, 2012

R code for Chapter 2 of Non-Life Insurance Pricing with GLM

37 min

Insurance

data

We continue working our way through the examples, case studies, and exercises of what is affectionately known here as “the two bears book” (Swedish björn = bear) and more…

Mar 13, 2012

R code for Chapter 1 of Non-Life Insurance Pricing with GLM

20 min

Insurance

data

Insurance pricing is backwards and primitive, harking back to an era before (powerful) computers. One standard (and good) textbook on the topic is Non-Life Insurance Pricing…

Mar 1, 2012

R versus SAS/SPSS in corporations

We love R, but it is not always the right answer

4 min

data

tools

We have created and managed analytics teams in commercial organizations (mainly telecommunications) across Europe. The teams were using SAS or SPSS. Our company now has a…

Oct 28, 2011

Commercial Analytics: The Capabilities

Commercial Analytics is the kind that makes money. From data to dollars, insights to income, this is all about how to run the business better. To do it and to do it well you…

Oct 5, 2011

5 common pitfalls of commercial analytics projects

11 min

business

data

We have 20 years of experience of big data environments within a variety of industries including Research, Banking, Insurance, and Telecommunications. We have especially…

Sep 5, 2011

Friday quote: what is the question to which this number is the answer?

1 min

quote

finance

John Kay muses on interpreting statistical data:

Aug 26, 2011

A warning on the R save format

4 min

The save() function in the R platform for statistical computing is very convenient and I suspect many of us use it a lot. But I was recently bitten by a “feature” of the…

Aug 23, 2011

Friday quote: the handmaiden and the whore

1 min

statistics

quote

Because it is Friday and because we collect quotes, here is one on statistics being the best and worst of disciplines. Which one of the two views are closest to your opinion?

Aug 19, 2011

Spreadsheet errors

4 min

data

For my sins, I have done more than my fair share of analysis in Excel. I am quite capable of building and maintaining 130Mb spreadsheets (I had a dozen of them for one…

Apr 20, 2011

Getting started with the Heritage Health Price competition

7 min

data

The US$ 3 million Heritage Health Price [link to archive.org] competition is on, so we take a look at how to get started using the R statistical computing and analysis…

Apr 8, 2011

Inflow segmentation – measuring new customers by value not volume

Do you have accurate and timely analysis of the quality of the customers you are acquiring?

4 min

business

Do you have accurate and timely analysis of the quality of the customers you are acquiring? Most companies carefully track the quantity of new customers by the hour, day, or…

Jan 6, 2011

Understanding reasons for churn – and what you can do about it

What offers work in retaining which customers?

4 min

business

We argued in our article on commercial churn modelling that you want to predict not only the probability of a customer leaving you but even more importantly what you can do…

Jan 5, 2011

Commercial churn modelling

Traditional churn modelling is easy and useless

6 min

business

Churn modelling is easy; commercial churn modelling is hard. Let us compare the two to explain what we mean by the latter.

Jan 4, 2011

Why?

To help you recover and rediscover the knowledge that is hidden in your data

2 min

favourite

Why do we do analytics? You will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free, said the teacher, and while he wasn’t talking about commercial data mining we think…

Jan 3, 2011

Benchmarking feature selection with Boruta and caret

8 min

data

Feature selection is the data mining process of selecting the variables from our data set that may have an impact on the outcome we are considering. For commercial data…

Nov 25, 2010

Feature selection: Using the caret package

5 min

data

Feature selection is an important step for practical commercial data mining which is often characterised by data sets with far too many variables for model building. In a…

Nov 16, 2010

Feature selection: All-relevant selection with the Boruta package

7 min

data

Feature selection is an important step for practical commercial data mining which is often characterised by data sets with far too many variables for model building. There…

Nov 15, 2010

Big data for R

Updated with suggestions on migration from Microsoft {RevoScaleR} to standard R

7 min

data

Revolutions Analytics recently announced their “big data” solution for R. This is great news and a lovely piece of work by the team at Revolutions.

Aug 5, 2010

Area Plots with Intensity Coloring

4 min

I am not sure apeescape’s ggplot2 area plot with intensity colouring (dead link) is really the best way of presenting the information, but it had me intrigued enough to…

Jul 13, 2010

Employee productivity revisited

Using London Stock Exchange data

2 min

business

We have a mild obsession with employee productivity and how that declines as companies get bigger. We have previously found that when you treble the number of workers, you…

Jun 22, 2010

Employee productivity as function of number of workers revisited

With all the code

5 min

business

We have a mild obsession with employee productivity and how that declines as companies get bigger. We have previously found that when you treble the number of workers, you…

Jun 22, 2010

Comparing standard R with Revoutions for performance

2 min

Following on from my previous post about improving performance of R by linking with optimized linear algebra libraries, I thought it would be useful to try out the five…

Jun 17, 2010

Faster R through better BLAS

4 min

Can we make our analysis using the R statistical computing and analysis platform run faster? Usually the answer is yes, and the best way is to improve your algorithm and…

Jun 15, 2010

Eliminating observed values with zero variance in R

4 min

I needed a fast way of eliminating observed values with zero variance from large data sets using the R statistical computing and analysis platform. In other words, I want to…

Mar 8, 2010

Your mobile phone knows everything about you … and it is telling

We know your mistress, your bank manager, and the boys on the football team you coach…

3 min

technology

privacy

We knew the potential existed already, of course. Mobile devices in the USA generates some 600 billion transactions per day, each tagged with the location and time. Jeff…

Aug 17, 2009

Beautiful Data

1 min

data

O’Reilly’s recent publication Beautiful Data has a chapter by Jeff Jonas which is enough reason in itself for me to recommend it. The chapter, Data Finds Data, is also…

Jul 27, 2009

Massively parallel database for analytics

1 min

data

technology

This is by far the best description of why traditional parallel databases (like Teradata, Greenplum et al.) is a evolutionary dead end. But much more than a theoretical…

Jul 22, 2009

B2B Content Marketing

2 min

marketing

The nice people at Velocity has released The B2B Content Marketing Workbook. It is¹ behind a registration wall which means we wouldn’t normally recommend it but you can just…

Jul 22, 2009

Marketing lessons from antiquity

2 min

sales

marketing

A story from antiquity involving a king of Rome and a Greek Sibyl has lovely marketing lessons.

Jul 10, 2009

The Knapsack Problem

1 min

data

David posts a question about how to solve this knapsack problem using the R statistical computing and analysis platform. My reply in the comments seems to have disappeared…

Jul 10, 2009

OECD Statistics

1 min

data

I am a sucker for good quality data. I wrote about data.gov, the US Government data site before, and now I find OECD Statistics which has some 300 data sets, many of which…

Jul 2, 2009

R tips: Determine if function is called from specific package

1 min

I like the {multicore} library for a particular task. I can easily write a combination of if(require("multicore",...)) that means that my function will automatically use the…

Jun 16, 2009

R tips: Installing Rmpi on Fedora Linux

Warning: obsolete instructions ahead image: /images/CC-BY-SA/Rlogo.svg

4 min

Somebody on the R-help mailing list asked how to get Rmpi working on his Fedora Linux machine so he could do high-performance computing on a cluster of machines (or a single…

Jun 12, 2009

Data Mashups in R from O’Reilly

1 min

data

O’Reilly has published Data Mashups in R ~~as a $4.99 PDF download~~¹ in their Short Cut series. In 27 pages it takes you through an example of how to combine foreclosure…

Jun 9, 2009

How to win the KDD Cup Challenge with R and gbm

3 min

data

Hugh Miller, the team leader of the winner of the KDD Cup 2009 Slow Challenge (which we wrote about recently) kindly provides more information about how to win this public…

Jun 1, 2009

R used by KDD 2009 cup winner of slow challenge

2 min

data

The results from the KDD Cup 2009 challenge (which we wrote about before) are in, and the winner of the slow challenge used the R statistical computing and analysis platform …

May 31, 2009

R tips: Use read.table instead of strsplit to split a text column into multiple columns

1 min

Someone on the R-help mailing list had a data frame with a column containing IP addresses in quad-dot format (e.g. 1.10.100.200). He wanted to sort by this column and I…

May 29, 2009

Do social networks influence purchases?

Havard Business School has an interesting study titled Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network?. I would like to get my hands on the raw data (which is from the…

May 22, 2009

data.gov

1 min

data

I am always on the lookout for useful data sources for training in statistics, so I am excited that data.gov has opened for business. The purpose of Data.gov is to increase…

May 22, 2009

KDD Cup 2009

Prediction is not the goal in business, action is

3 min

data

The results from the KDD Cup 2009 are both interesting and fundamentally not interesting. For this public data mining challenge Orange, the mobile telecommunications…

May 12, 2009

SNA with R: Loading large networks using the igraph library

4 min

data

networks

We are interested in Social Network Analysis using the statistical analysis and computing platform R. The documentation for R is voluminous but typically not very good, so…

May 6, 2009

SNA with R: Loading your network data in statnet

7 min

data

networks

We are interested in Social Network Analysis using the statistical analysis and computing platform R. As usual with R, the documentation is pretty bad, so this series…

Apr 1, 2009

R tips: Swapping columns in a matrix

1 min

Using R, the statistical analysis and computing platform, swapping two columns in a matrix is really easy:

Mar 31, 2009

R tips: Eliminating the “save workspace image” prompt on exit

2 min

When using R, the statistical analysis and computing platform, I find it really annoying that it always prompts to save the workspace when I exit. This is how I turn it off.

Mar 26, 2009

R tips: Keep your packages up-to-date

4 min

In this entry in a small series of tips for the use of the R statistical analysis and computing tool, we look at how to keep your add-on packages up-to-date.

Mar 25, 2009

The financial crisis and physicists

6 min

business

finance

The financial crisis is all my fault. Or so David Smith from our friends REvolution¹ seems to suggest in his post Physicists, models, and the credit crisis:

Mar 20, 2009

Happy birthday WWW

“It will never take off, Tim”

1 min

Twenty years ago, on 13th March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the original proposal for what was to become the World Wide Web. Happy birthday!

Mar 12, 2009

5 step process for customer base segmentation

Database analysis, market survey, -strategy, -research, and customer needs

6 min

business

Over the last years we have been doing a tremendous amount of customer segmentation work with the marketing departments in companies across a number of industries. We have…

Feb 26, 2009

3 things we want from a segmentation of the customer base

Segments that are meaningful, stable, and differentiating on important business variables

6 min

business

Over the last years we have been doing a tremendous amount of customer segmentation work with the marketing departments in companies across a number of industries. We have…

Feb 26, 2009

4 easy steps to make Mason utf-8 Unicode clean with Apache, mod_perl, and DBI

7 min

technology

This is a note for people who are using the Mason system for high-performance, dynamic web site authoring with Apache, mod_perl, and a relational database like PostgreSQL acc…

Jan 28, 2009

The truth about venture capitalists according to Marc Andreessen

1 min

start-up

finance

Marc Andreessen, who as founder of Netscape and other companies knows a thing or two about the subject, has a nice little series on The Truth About Venture Capitalists, part 1…

Jun 10, 2007

Innovation forever

5 min

innovation

We are keen on innovation here at CYBAEA, so I feel obliged to mention two articles on the subject that I noticed this week.

May 27, 2007

Enterprise social software and profits per employee

2 min

business

McKinsey writes about Better Strategy Through Organizational Design [PDF] and come out strongly in favor of Enterprise Social Software and collaboration techniques:

May 24, 2007

Need to know versus need to share

1 min

data

If you are into security, classification, and document sharing, then you need to read Jeff Jonas’ post “Need to Know” vs. “Need to Share” – A Very Fine Line Indeed.…

May 9, 2007

Do you have a customer strategy?

Does everyone agree on who is the best customer?

1 min

business

I am in Las Vegas for the Unica user conference where we are considering the future of marketing (and how Unica can help you spend a lot of money, naturally). Darcy Bevelacqua…

May 8, 2007

The Post-GUI era

3 min

technology

The Post-GUI era. I like the expression and I think what it tries to encapsulate is important.

Apr 6, 2007

Enterprise Social Software is Mainstream

3 min

technology

software

Enterprise Social Software has gone mainstream. I say this based on the fact that the analysts are now releasing stacks of research on this area. Forrester is a good example…

Mar 24, 2007

Enterprise Social Software Links

1 min

software

We don’t normally post just links, but sometimes it is just too hard to keep up with the good stuff. Mike writes from South Africa about lessons learned from social software…

Feb 19, 2007

Optimal Knowledge Management

3 min

business

Interest in productivity and how to manage innovation and know-how appears to be growing. Our article on employee productivity gets about four times more hits than the next…

Feb 12, 2007

Influencers are not influential

1 min

networks

You are not nearly as influential as you think you are. One of my friends are doing research on influencers in mobile networks, and he is going to be crushed (or maybe not)…

Feb 7, 2007

Skill versus luck

1 min

start-up

When it comes to being an entrepreneur or venture capitalist, is it better to be lucky or good? According to a new working paper, Skill vs. Luck in Entrepreneurship and…

Nov 21, 2006

When Venture Capital is more than capital

Venture Capital money is very expensive; probably by far the most expensive money you will ever get. The usual defense from the industry is that you so much more than just…

Nov 14, 2006

Innovation in consumer goods

Business models as the enablers of innovation

2 min

business

innovation

Sometimes the barriers to innovation is outdated business models. Railroads and telegraphs needed the modern corporation and semiconductors and software needed venture capital…

Nov 6, 2006

The 3/2 rule revisited

2 min

business

productivity

We revisited the 3/2 rule of employee productivity using a larger data set and considering each sector independently.

Oct 19, 2006

The 3/2 rule of employee productivity

4 min

business

productivity

The more employees your company has, the less productive each of these employees are. It is a generalization, of course, but a useful one and one that is confirmed by most…

Oct 16, 2006

InfoNGEN

2 min

business

wayback

About a year ago we did some work with a London-based private equity fund. The problem was information overload and the idea was to bring together multiple data sources…

Oct 4, 2006

Thinking about success

1 min

business

Tom Peters made me think about how we define success. If you had a list of companies like Netscape, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Oracle, which ones would you consider the the…

Sep 13, 2006

55 Ways to Have Fun With Google

1 min

fun

I created an A4 version of the 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google book. If you are in a country where that is a usual paper size and you want to print the book, then this may…

Sep 11, 2006

Telling the truth: technique for unbiased survey answers

5 min

data

bias

The truth. It is not always easy to get to it. If you are doing surveys or questionnaires you will know that people do not always reply honestly but are biased towards…

Sep 7, 2006

XSLT + AJAX Data Grid

2 min

data

technology

The XSLT + AJAX data grid described over on XML.com looks very interesting and solves a real and very common problem. Be sure to try the examples: there are lots of features…

Sep 1, 2006

BI Megatrends 2006 is out

But there still isn’t enough business in Business Intelligence….

2 min

technology

wayback

The BI Megatrends report for 2006 is out.

Sep 1, 2006

John Kay on intuition

2 min

decisions

The second part of John Kay’s article that we wrote about recently is now available online called The maths may be simple but intuition is more use.

Aug 30, 2006

A data driven business? But you can’t be sure your mathematical model is correct….

1 min

business

data

“Data driven business” is one of the new buzzwords, and we are completely behind an approach to doing business that is fouded on real, observed data and rational decision.…

Aug 22, 2006

RFID and privacy

1 min

technology

wayback

We have written about RFID in the past, and the press has contained much debate about the privacy implications in a world where increasingly everything is tagged with a…

Aug 20, 2006

Fenwick Venture Capital Survey and other publications

2 min

start-up

wayback

The 2Q06 Fenwick & West Venture Capital Survey summarizing venture capital terms in Silicon Valley is out, which seems like a good time to mention their other publications.…

Aug 18, 2006

Marketing as the corporate head of customer experience, knowledge, and influence

1 min

business

marketing

Forrester says it well when it argues that the corporate Marketing function must

Aug 8, 2006

Whatever happened to focusing on profits?

3 min

business

We help companies grow, and that includes obtaining growth capital through private placements and listing on AIM. An integral part is to help build the right management team…

May 15, 2006

Will Google destroy the internet?

2 min

business

What is the biggest threat to the internet as a source of information exchange? The music industry dinosaurs that are stuck in copyright hell? The control freaks in the…

Apr 11, 2006

Paper’s Revenge

3 min

business

Financial analysts are being asked to sign documents agreeing that they will only publish their research “in physical form” and not allow it to be “included in an electronic…

Apr 11, 2006

Internet as a utility

1 min

business

I spent last week without internet access. The office where I was working only had closed network access, Bluetooth on my laptop has failed so I couldn’t use my mobile as a…

Mar 15, 2006

Connecting people in the creative enterprise

2 min

business

technology

In order to get any new project or initiative underway in a large enterprise, you need at least three people: somebody with the idea or business problem, somebody who can…

Mar 6, 2006

How to retire early (and be happy and productive)

2 min

finance

So you have invested in the Next Net 25, made a fortune¹ and looking to retire. What to do? How to cope? Philip Greenspun (who retired aged 37) has the answer in Early…

Mar 6, 2006

The Long Snout: A business model for online information

1 min

business

The internet revolution has proved a headache for most information providers. How are you going to charge for online access? Tim O’Reilly seems to be close to cracking the…

Mar 6, 2006

At work we are all fighter pilots

3 min

business

work

At work, we are all fighter pilots. We have to deal with large amounts of constantly changing data in an environment with many disruptions. Information is no longer a scarce…

Mar 5, 2006

Most decisions are wrong

1 min

business

decisions

In an uncertain, changing world, most decisions are wrong, and success comes not from the inspired visions of exceptional leaders, or prescience achieved through…

Mar 3, 2006

Making navigation complex

Sometimes, additional complexity is good

2 min

business

Sometimes, you want to expose the inherent complexity of the subject matter in order to engage the use and draw him more deeply into the material. Then, more, not less…

Mar 1, 2006

Prayer podcasting

How charities and not-for-profits can use the internet to broaden and deepen their reach.

2 min

technology

You know a technology has reached mainstream when you are no longer surprised by who is adopting it. In that sense, it is completely non-news that the Jesuits in London are…

Feb 28, 2006

Are you useful after the event?

2 min

business

Consider the web sites for organizations that provide events for your life, either in the sense of for example conferences which are events in themselves or places like…

Feb 28, 2006

The Economist on ‘The blog in the corporate machine’

5 min

business

The article The blog in the corporate machine from this week’s edition of The Economist is focusing squarely on managing corporate reputations in a blogging world, and is…

Feb 12, 2006

Valuation of O2 mobile business

2 min

business

In our previous analysis we suggested that O2 was undervalued relative to the rest of the UK mobile industry, though that wasn’t our main objective. In summary, we showed…

Nov 6, 2005

Why is knowledge management failing?

3 min

business

knowledge management

Martin and Dave wonders why knowledge management has failed: the grand (and sometimes successful) projects of the late nineties and early noughties have come to nothing, and…

Nov 6, 2005

Return on Customer and change in market capitalization

2 min

business

Our long-suffering readership is presumably tired of hearing any more about our analysis of the UK mobile industry. We promise that this post is the last in the series…

Nov 6, 2005

ROC for mobile industry 2

2 min

business

Somebody commented that our previous analysis of the Return on Customer formulas for the mobile industry did not take into account the change in the overall number of…

Oct 8, 2005

Customer equity and enterprise value in the mobile industry - Take 2

3 min

business

In our previous post we showed a very strong correlation between the market capitalization of three very different mobile companies and their UK performance. In this post we…

Oct 6, 2005

ROC for mobile industry

3 min

business

Apparently, his publishers told Stephen Hawking that for every formula he put into his book, A Brief History of Time, he would halve his sales. I sense our small readership…

Oct 5, 2005

Customer equity and market value in the UK mobile industry

6 min

business

Inspired by Peppers & Rogers’ new book Return on Customer, we decided to calculate customer equity and return on customer equity for the UK mobile industry to see if we…

Oct 2, 2005

The Economist on a roll

1 min

software

The Economist is on a roll this week. Go and buy it if you do not subscribe. (Links below may require subscription.)

Sep 16, 2005

Linkfest:Business and entrepreneurship

7 min

business

start-up

I am experimenting with Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) as my RSS reader. Before, I used Bloglines. The change gave me an excuse to go back to my Bloglines clippings folder and…

Sep 4, 2005

Howard is leaving venture capital

4 min

start-up

finance

Howard Anderson writes in Technology Review why he is leaving the venture capital industry. He gives several reasons.

Jul 3, 2005

How to win the game of chicken

2 min

sales

Want to improve your chances of winning a game of chicken? Throw away your steering wheel!

Jun 8, 2005

The end of the deal flow

2 min

start-up

Bill Burnham writes about the changing business landscape for venture capital firms and what that means for their ways of doing business.

May 26, 2005

Entrepreneurial Signaling: The Art of Collecting Peacock Feathers

2 min

start-up

Kevin Laws suggests that, as a startup company looking for funding, you should be collecting peacock feathers:

May 19, 2005

Gartner on CRM

3 min

sales

Gartner was to industry analysts what Microsoft is to desktop computing and WalMart to retail shopping: the giant you couldn’t afford to ignore. Especially during the…

Apr 29, 2005

Organizational success for outsourcing

4 min

business

We are fascinated by interfaces and boundaries. The tension and frictions that are present at boundaries can lead to phenomenal creativity and insights. Or to equally…

Apr 25, 2005

Disruptive innovation as a core business process

2 min

innovation

Companies need to innovate relentlessly to even stand still in an increasingly global and competitive economy. No longer is it sufficient to deliver incremental improvements…

Apr 22, 2005

Innovation in online book sales

3 min

business

networks

Why did Barnes & Noble lose out to upstart Amazon.com in the battle for our online book purchases? Simply put, the new company out-innovated the established bookseller. By…

Apr 21, 2005

Approaches to enterprise social software

4 min

business

software

An important article in the March 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review suggests that organizations are approaching enterprise social software from three distinct value…

Apr 17, 2005

Actions for Enterprise Collaboration

2 min

business

We are very excited for a new approach to managing enterprise collaboration that we have developed with Four Groups and described in some detail in our recent publication Act…

Apr 17, 2005

Happy Birthday, H.C.

2 min

Happy birthday, Hans Christian! Today is the 200 anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish poet and author famous for his fairy tales.

Apr 2, 2005

Presenting and selling technology to corporates: The lying awake at night test

2 min

sales

Too many technology companies are trying to sell their products to the corporate enterprise on their technical merits. This very rarely succeeds. Your customers are not in…

Mar 6, 2005

Understanding is only achieved in synchronous communication.

“We are just too busy to listen.”

2 min

networks

Understanding seems only to genuinely be achieved in synchronous communication argues John Barben in Telling but not listening.

Feb 18, 2005

Work-life balance

Maybe entrepreneurship, consulting, and the priesthood of the original article are all vocations, and we are wrong to consider them as simply jobs.

3 min

work

We’ve been thinking a lot about what you might call work-life balance recently, when we came across this piece is a completely different context, arguing that all…

Jan 31, 2005

Business Science - an Oxymoron?

1 min

science

A challenge with using scientific principles in a business context is that the system, i.e. the business world, is neither isolated nor in equilibrium. A soon as a new idea…

Jan 20, 2005

Transparency and types of partnerships

2 min

business

Based on Ronald Coase’s theory of firms, Lars Plougmann argues that transparency is the next big thing, and offers specific advice for professional services. The core of his…

Dec 12, 2004

The Economist on the Private Equity Industry

2 min

finance

Managed to catch up and read The Economist this weekend. Their survey, The new kings of capitalism (subscription required for most articles – do yourself a favour and…

Nov 29, 2004

Free advice is worth every penny … and that is how we treat it

3 min

business

consulting

Any article that concludes in its very first sentence that consulting is an industry that never goes out of style is bound to appeal to my consultant’s heart. The…

Nov 15, 2004

Social Software in the Enterprise: A Historic Perspective

22 min

business

favourite

The applications of social software to the enterprise will profoundly change our business culture and therefore it will be a substantial force for shaping what our society…

Nov 9, 2004

Results from social network analysis

3 min

networks

Natural science is well known for using mathematical models over “common sense” and intuition, to the frustration of many students. The use of mathematics in social sciences…

Oct 4, 2004

Tell-tale signs of a business going down

2 min

business

Michael Jackson, the chariman of Elderstreet Investments and Sage and an expereinced entrepreneur and investor, writes in Business XL about the eight tell-tale signs that a…

Sep 25, 2004

Why you can be an entrepreneur with less capital

2 min

start-up

Joe Kraus, who among other things founded Excite, has a new blog called Bnoopy where he recently highlighted three cost differences between starting a technology company in…

Sep 20, 2004

Mintzberg on corporate blogging

2 min

business

I am re-reading the classic articles from the Harvard Business Review, and the 1975 article by Henry Mintzberg titled The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact is not only as…

Aug 11, 2004

Research project: Increasing innovation velocity in the enterprise using text clustering

5 min

business

research

I have an interest in social software in the enterprise - the use of tools like blogs, wikis, document management, rss, communities, discussion boards, and so on within…

Jul 21, 2004

Darwin and the Demon – Innovating Within Established Enterprises

2 min

business

innovation

Geoffrey A. Moore has an important article in the July-August 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review. Articulating and systematising what we probably already understand…

Jul 14, 2004

Content is the slug’s trail in social software

2 min

social software

I proposed a slightly provocative definition of social software when we were discussing it at the July 2004 London Symposium on Social Tools for the Enterprise.

Jul 13, 2004

What Is Your Business?

4 min

business

start-up

A common activity when we work with start-up companies is to help them discover what business they are in. It may sound surprising to people who are not entrepreneurs…

May 9, 2004

Social Software in the Enterprise

8 min

business

software

“We like to think that we hire mostly above-average people with above-average skills and motivation. We know that our future as a company depends on our ability to…

Apr 20, 2004

Sometimes the shortest route is a long one

2 min

networks

Sometimes the shortest route is a long one. I am still a little dubious about some of the social networking sites out there, but one thing I find absolutely fascinating is…

Mar 12, 2004

Business process outsourcing with a difference

2 min

business

I have seen the future of business process outsourcing (BPO) to India and other large, low-cost areas, and it is very different from what the current promoters would like…

Feb 24, 2004

Entrepreneurial vision

What is a company vision, how do you discover it, and when do you need it?

25 min

vision

business

Your company vision is essential to articulate in three key situations in the firm’s evolution. We discuss what these are after defining what is a vision and how you can…

Jan 26, 2004