CYBAEA Journal

The AI Dependency Trap
Do you have governance, or just a subscription to someone else’s risk appetite?
5 min
AI
AI Governance
Risk Management
Tech Strategy
CDO
Your most difficult AI governance risk may not come from your own projects or anything you do yourself.
Allan Engelhardt
Apr 27, 2026

The AI Arms Race Has a Fatal Flaw. Are You Measuring What Matters?
The true measure of enterprise-grade AI is resilience.
5 min
AI
AI Governance
Risk Management
Tech Strategy
CDO
In the corporate AI arms race, the pressure is immense: adopt the latest, most powerful models or risk being left behind. Shareholders expect it, vendors promise…
Allan Engelhardt
Oct 28, 2025

EARL Conference 2025
From Data to Decision.
4 min
EARL
Conference
Huge thanks to Datacove and all the organizers and sponsors of EARL 2025. Fantastic to meet, connect, and hear from so many practitioners of enterprise applications of data…
Allan Engelhardt
Oct 20, 2025

Are you building yesterday’s information architecture tomorrow?
Why the Model Context Protocol (MCP) defines the AI-First future for enterprise data.
4 min
AI
AI-First
Model Context Protocol
Data Architecture
Are you investing today to build yesterday’s information architecture tomorrow? The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is not just for AI tools but changes the way we think about…
Allan Engelhardt
Oct 19, 2025

The myth of the graduate ‘jobpocalypse’?
Another day, another news story. We see the headlines. We hear the warnings. Eventually we are repeating the mantra: AI is killing entry-level jobs. But is it?
4 min
AI
Business Strategy
Future of Work
Another day, another news story on how AI is already destroying graduate job opportunities. We see the headlines. We hear the warnings. Eventually we are repeating the…
Allan Engelhardt
Sep 29, 2025

Stop Being a Data Scientist. Start Being a Data Craftsman.
Businesses are drowning in data but starving for insights that transform their bottom line. Why? Because we treat data science like a production line, not a craft.
5 min
Data Science
Machine Learning
AI
Business Strategy
Businesses are drowning in data but starving for insights that transform their bottom line. Why?
Allan Engelhardt
Aug 3, 2025

Why Most AI Projects Fail (And How to Fix Them)
The best AI projects often look deceptively simple. That’s because they solve real problems rather than interesting technical challenges.
3 min
AI
Analytics
Decision Science
Business Strategy
I’ve been watching companies pour millions into AI projects for decades now. The promise is always the same: “This will revolutionise how we make decisions.” The reality?…
Allan Engelhardt
Jun 30, 2025

The data quality excuse (and why it’s holding you back)
Here’s why the “perfect data” myth is more dangerous than messy data.
3 min
Insurance
Lloyds of London
AI
ML
Data Quality
“Our data isn’t good enough for AI yet.”
Allan Engelhardt
Jun 18, 2025

Why smart insurance executives are afraid of AI (and why they are not wrong)
The best insurance executives aren’t avoiding AI – they’re approaching it like underwriters: assessing risk, managing exposure, and making calculated bets.
3 min
Insurance
Lloyds of London
AI
ML
We just completed a survey of Lloyd’s insurance market leaders about AI adoption, and the results might surprise you. These aren’t technophobic traditionalists – they’re…
Allan Engelhardt
Jun 13, 2025

Most return to office policies are just lazy leadership
Don’t leave culture, learning, innovation and productivity to chance
4 min
RTO
RTW
At least 28% of British employees are hybrid workers1 and many more could be. We apologise to the 60% or so of the working population who have no personal interest in the…
Allan Engelhardt
May 18, 2025

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
UK
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
R-Shiny
BW
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?
2 min
Insurance
Case study
Customer testimonial
BW
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
1 min
Finance
Business case
Retail finance
Case study
BW
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
1 min
Hospitality
Hotel
FTSE250
BW
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
1 min
ESG
SECR
Carbon report
BW
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
CX
BW
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
BW
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
CX
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
CX
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
6 min
CX
CXA
Economics
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
4 min
CX
CXA
Economics
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
CX
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
CX
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?
2 min
business
CVM
DVM
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
3 min
business
CVM
NPS
case study
customer success
Automotive
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
2 min
business
data science
R
training
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
3 min
business
CXA
CX
case study
customer success
Insurance
Financial Services
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
1 min
business
GI
case study
customer success
Insurance
Financial Services
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
3 min
insurance
data
business
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
4 min
marketing
business
R
training
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
R
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!
2 min
R
training
analytics
Back by popular demand! We have been asked many times when we would run again the Marketing Analytics Using R training course. We used to do it with Revolution Analytics whic…
Oct 3, 2016

The Customer Insight function as a growth engine
8 min
business
customer insights
data science
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
2 min
data
marketing
training
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
11 min
data
business
favourite
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
36 min
R
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
19 min
R
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
R
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
12 min
data
business
favourite
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
R
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
R
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
6 min
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
O’Reilly has published Data Mashups in R as a $4.99 PDF download1 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
R
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
R
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
R
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?
1 min
business
networks
sales
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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
R
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

Snippet from USA Today article

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
2 min
start-up
finance
wayback
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
2 min
business
innovation
Related to our previous article on new business models for innovation, McKinsey has a piece on reinventing innovation in consumer goods companies which challenges companies…
Nov 6, 2006

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
UX

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

The Commodities Economy and the New Technology Trends
4 min
business
technology
Business Process Management (BPM), Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Utility or Grid Computing and many other “hot topics” in today’s IT environment all…
Jan 20, 2004

Mobile Speech Recognition as a Disruptive Technology
2 min
innovation
I must admit I never did get speech recognition as a disruptive technology. Isn’t it just another dial-pad digit-entry IVR application? Sure, it is much more sophisticated…
Nov 18, 2003

Optimizing Viral Marketing: A Practical Approach
2 min
networks
marketing
A recent paper by David Kempe et al. provides practical answers to the problem of viral marketing: if we can try to convince a subset of individuals to adopt a new product…
Nov 17, 2003

Social Software Review Part 4: Spoke Software
2 min
social software
In many ways similar to LinkedIn (and therefore to the original Six Degrees) in scope and intent, Spoke Software tackles the problem of maintaining the software’s…
Nov 10, 2003

SPSS acquires DataDistilleries
4 min
software
I have been a fan of the DataDistilleries technology for a long time and we have worked closely with with them in one of the companies I have founded. Their core products…
Nov 7, 2003

Social Software Review Part 3: Ryze
2 min
social software
Somewhere between a collection of discussion forums and a networking site, the focus at Ryze is on making contacts through shared interests. It is not dissimilar to The Well.
Nov 5, 2003

Social Software Review Part 2: LinkedIn
A review of LinkedIn, published six months after its launch.
2 min
social software
LinkedIn
With an unabashed business focus, LinkedIn is perhaps the nearest successor to the original SixDegrees site. The focus is on connecting business contacts through your…
Nov 4, 2003

Social Software Review Part 1: Introduction to Social Network Software
2 min
social software
There is a growing class of software that allows you to manage your social network online and to use this network to make new contacts. Different implementations of this…
Nov 3, 2003

Requirements for Electronic Representation of Social Networks
With examples based on LinkedIn (as it were back in 2003)
5 min
networks
It seems to me that the requirements for systems like LinkedIn, Friendster, and many others, all of which allow you to document your social networks and, ultimately, profit…
Oct 13, 2003

A Definition of Collaborative CRM
2 min
CRM
The term “Collaborative CRM” seems, like so many other phrases associated with customer relationship management (CRM) to be confused and confusing. We need to define what it…
Oct 1, 2003

Trust Networks
2 min
networks
“You really should listen to this guy”, said one of my friends, and so I went along and have a very interesting meeting with somebody I didn’t know. Very unremarkable, you…
Sep 30, 2003

Welcome Amazonians: Amazon facts and figures
2 min
business
networks
AWS
Returning from a short project we find more than usual activity on our website. Some investigation uncovers that our research paper Business Platforms: Profiting From Networks…
Sep 29, 2003

Where and how middlemen add value
5 min
networks
business
One of the ideas of the late nineties’ e-commerce boom was that of disintermediation: that brokers, middlemen, and other layers between buyers and sellers would disappear…
Sep 23, 2003

New research paper: Business platforms
1 min
business
networks
A new research paper is now available on this site. The paper, Business Platforms: Profiting From Networks discusses network effects and how to profit from them using…
Sep 8, 2003

William Gibson on Risk Management: It’s the only idea of our times
2 min
risk
I thought it was interesting to read William Gibson’s argument that risk management isn’t just a good idea but is, in an important sense, the only idea of our times.
Jun 27, 2003

Now is the time to cash in on CRM
4 min
business
I wrote a small (800 words) article (PDF) for one of the industry analyst’s publications on why it is the right time to finally get some real return on all those CRM…
Jun 11, 2003

Selling Software: Artisans of the world, unite!
7 min
business
The inimitable Tim Bray has an interesting little two-part musing titled Business Ignorance. Part product placement, the main concern of the article are thoughts and ideas…
May 27, 2003

Linked: The New Science of Networks
5 min
thinking
book
networks
It happens occasionally in human history that a completely new idea appears. Not just any idea, but a significant change in the way we humans think about the world and…
Jan 24, 2003
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