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The future of general insurance pricing

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

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

Launching Data Navigator: the essential benchmarking tool for independent schools

Building large scale R Shiny applications and deploying on docker

Sector:Education

Most of our team at Barnett Waddingham spent the first seven months of 2023 building and launching Data Navigator for Schools (DN4S).…

Allan Engelhardt

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?

Customer testimonial

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

Allan Engelhardt

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…

Allan Engelhardt

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

Evolving your Employer DNA

Effective communications re-imagining the future

Allan Engelhardt and Jane Ralph chats with the wonderful Tom Cheesewright about…

Allan Engelhardt, Jane Ralph, Tom Cheesewright

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.

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

Allan Engelhardt joins Barnett Waddingham

Providing a unique platform to enhance our offerings

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 making…

Allan Engelhardt

Game ⚽n

Winning against sales leakage with Customer Experience

In this webinar, Henrik Janér, Neil Wilson, and Allan Engelhardt share their experiences of customer experience (CX)…

Allan Engelhardt, Henrik Janer, Neil Wilson

9 Customer Experience priorities for the new year

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…

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 classic value drivers…

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 solutions vendor, of…

3 CX priorities for 8 company cultures

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 the opposite question…

CX Conversations: Are yours unhelpful?

Cassandra Goodman makes a…

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.…

Big Data Fail

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

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 started exploiting big data early and where the scope for exploiting data is perhaps…

Commercial churn impact from limited data

customer success

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’. In this case study, a Nordic giant in the automotive import and servicing business was facing a real…

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 Marketing Analytics using…

Journey to profits: valuing the customer experience success story

5.5% immediate growth from tactical CX actions

customer success

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…

Google loves us 100%

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 Analytics using Microsoft R and Azure training course for live classes…

Oil and Data: Downstream Data Science

CYBAEA are the downstream data scientists

Data is the new oil, gushes The Economist…

Under pressure, discover opportunity: Customer success story

customer success

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…

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

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…

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, ie a net loss, due to its…

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 responses. Among the many topics covered, we discuss…

How do we know that marketing works?

How do we know that marketing works? It was National Poetry Day in Britain recently, and I do believe that…

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

Back by poular demand!

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 which is now part of Microsoft but…

The Customer Insight function as a growth engine

customer insights

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

Microsoft Analytics in 2016

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…

Net Promoter Score confidence intervals 2: maths and stats

We looked at a rule of thumb for confidence intervals and what that means for a business manager in our previous post.…

R in Insurance 2016

The 2016 conference on R in Insurance will be held on Monday 11 July 2016. This year we are back at…

Net Promoter Score confidence intervals

How many responses do you need in order to have an accurate measure of the Net Promoter Score? What is the confidence…

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.

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…

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

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

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…

R versus SAS/SPSS in corporations

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

We have created and managed analytics teams in commercial…

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…

5 common pitfalls of commercial analytics projects

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

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

John Kay muses on interpreting statistical data:

A warning on the R save format

The save() function in the R platform for…

Friday quote: the handmaiden and the whore

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?

Spreadsheet errors

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…

Getting started with the Heritage Health Price competition

The US$ 3 million Heritage Health Price [link to archive.org] …

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?

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 certainly the week, but it is still less common to track the quality of the inflow as it happens. It is interesting to know that we…

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

What offers work in retaining which customers?

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 about it. We want to predict why the customer is…

Commercial churn modelling

Traditional churn modelling is easy and useless

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

Why?

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

Why do we do analytics? You will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free, said the…

Benchmarking feature selection with Boruta and caret

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…

Feature selection: Using the caret package

Feature selection is…

Feature selection: All-relevant selection with the Boruta package

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…

Big data for R

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

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.

Area Plots with Intensity Coloring

I am not sure apeescape’s ggplot2 area plot with intensity colouring (dead link) is really the…

Employee productivity revisited

Using London Stock Exchange data

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…

Employee productivity as function of number of workers revisited

With all the code

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…

Comparing standard R with Revoutions for performance

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…

Faster R through better BLAS

Can we make our analysis using the R statistical computing and analysis platform run faster?…

Eliminating observed values with zero variance in 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 find the columns in a data frame that has zero variance. And as fast as possible, because my data sets are large, many, and changing fast. The…

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…

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…

Beautiful 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 available…

Massively parallel database for analytics

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…

B2B Content 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 type junk in…

Marketing lessons from antiquity

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

The Knapsack Problem

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 for a while so here is my proposed solution. See David’s blog…

OECD Statistics

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 seems to be readily…

R tips: Determine if function is called from specific package

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

R tips: Installing Rmpi on Fedora Linux

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

Somebody on the R-help…

Data Mashups in R from O’Reilly

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…

How to win the KDD Cup Challenge with R and gbm

Hugh Miller, the team leader of the winner of the KDD Cup 2009 Slow Challenge (which we wrote about recently) kindly…

R used by KDD 2009 cup winner of slow challenge

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 for their winning…

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

Someone on the R-help…

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…

data.gov

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 public access to…

KDD Cup 2009

Prediction is not the goal in business, action is

The results from the KDD Cup 2009 are both interesting and fundamentally not interesting. For this public data mining challenge Orange, the mobile telecommunications company, provided anonymous data sets on mobile customers: 50,000 records each of training and testing data with 15,000 variables. (The data…

SNA with R: Loading large networks using the igraph library

We are interested in Social Network Analysis using the statistical analysis and computing platform…

SNA with R: Loading your network data in statnet

We are interested in Social Network Analysis using the statistical analysis and computing…

R tips: Swapping columns in a matrix

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

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

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.

R tips: Keep your packages up-to-date

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.

The financial crisis and physicists

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:

Happy birthday WWW

“It will never take off, Tim”

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!

5 step process for customer base segmentation

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

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

3 things we want from a segmentation of the customer base

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

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

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

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 accessed through DBI, and who want to be utf-8 Unicode clean in all…

The truth about venture capitalists according to Marc Andreessen

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…

Innovation forever

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

Enterprise social software and profits per employee

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

Need to know versus need to share

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. Otherwise you should…

Do you have a customer strategy?

Does everyone agree on who is the best customer?

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 from Harte Hanks had a neat line. As a consultant, she gets called in to help companies to define their direct marketing (and customer relationship) approach and to…

The Post-GUI era

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

Enterprise Social Software is Mainstream

Enterprise Social Software has gone…

Enterprise Social Software Links

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…

Optimal Knowledge Management

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 most popular post. I imagine that more and more people in the West are waking up to the fact that innovation and high…

Influencers are not influential

Skill versus luck

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…

When Venture Capital is more than capital

Venture Capital money is very expensive; probably by far the most expensive money you will…

Innovation in consumer goods

Related to our previous article on new business models for innovation, McKinsey has a piece on reinventing innovation in consumer goods companies…

Business models as the enablers of innovation

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

The 3/2 rule revisited

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

The 3/2 rule of employee 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…

InfoNGEN

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…

Thinking about success

Tom Peters made me think about how we define…

55 Ways to Have Fun With Google

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…

Telling the truth: technique for unbiased survey answers

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…

XSLT + AJAX Data Grid

The XSLT + AJAX data grid des…

BI Megatrends 2006 is out

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

The BI Megatrends report for 2006 is out.

John Kay on intuition

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.

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

“Data driven…

RFID and privacy

We have written about RFID in the past, and the press has contained much debate about the privacy…

Fenwick Venture Capital Survey and other publications

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. Unashamedly US and West Coast centric there are some good documents in there for…

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

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

Whatever happened to focusing on profits?

We help companies…

Will Google destroy the internet?

What is the biggest threat to the internet as a source of…

Paper’s Revenge

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…

Internet as a utility

I spent last week without internet access. The office where I was working only had closed network access, Bluetooth on my laptop has…

Connecting people in the creative enterprise

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

How to retire early (and be happy and productive)

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 Ea…

The Long Snout: A business model for online information

The internet revolution…

At work we are all fighter pilots

At work, we are all…

Most decisions are wrong

In an uncertain, changing world, most decisions are wrong, and success comes not from the inspired…

Making navigation complex

Sometimes, additional complexity is good

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…

Prayer podcasting

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

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…

Are you useful after the event?

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…

The Economist on ‘The blog in the corporate machine’

The article The blog in the corporate machine from this week’s edition of…

Valuation of O2 mobile 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 that the key markets…

Why is knowledge management failing?

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…

Return on Customer and change in market capitalization

Our long-suffering readership is presumably…

ROC for mobile industry 2

Somebody commented that our previous analysis of the Return on Customer fo…

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

In our previous post we showed a very…

ROC for mobile industry

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 may be decimated by this article. We’ll try to keep it…

Customer equity and market value in the UK mobile industry

Inspired by Peppers & Rogers’ new book Return on Customer, we decided to calculate customer…

The Economist on a roll

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

Linkfest:Business and entrepreneurship

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 look at some old posts I had saved. It is good to look back sometimes, so here are…

Howard is leaving venture capital

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

How to win the game of chicken

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

The end of the deal flow

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

Entrepreneurial Signaling: The Art of Collecting Peacock Feathers

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

Gartner on CRM

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 Customer…

Organizational success for outsourcing

Disruptive innovation as a core business process

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…

Innovation in online book sales

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

Approaches to enterprise social software

An important article in the March 2005 issue of the Harvard Business…

Actions for Enterprise Collaboration

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 Actions for Enterprise…

Happy Birthday, H.C.

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.

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

Too many technology companies are trying to sell their products to the corporate enterprise on their technical…

Understanding is only achieved in synchronous communication.

“We are just too busy to listen.”

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

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.

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 professions are…

Business Science - an Oxymoron?

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…

Transparency and types of partnerships

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 argument is that because trasactional costs for companies are ever decreasing, the business…

The Economist on the Private Equity Industry

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…

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

Any article that concludes in its very first sentence that consulting is an industry that never goes out of style i…

Social Software in the Enterprise: A Historic Perspective

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…

Results from social network analysis

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

Tell-tale signs of a business going down

Michael Jackson, the chariman of Elderstreet Investments and Sage and an expereinced entrepreneur and investor, writes in Business XL about the eight…

Why you can be an entrepreneur with less capital

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

Mintzberg on corporate blogging

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 relevant as ever, but in the light of developments in using social tools in the workspace, Mintzberg seems to be…

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

I have an interest in social software in the enterprise - the use of tools…

Darwin and the Demon – Innovating Within Established Enterprises

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 at some level, Mr. Moore proposes a taxonomy of innovation and reminds us how different types of…

Content is the slug’s trail in social software

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.

What Is Your Business?

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…

Social Software in the Enterprise

“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…

Sometimes the shortest route is a long one

Sometimes the shortest route is a long one. I am still a little dubious…

Business process outsourcing with a difference

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…

Entrepreneurial vision

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

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…

The Commodities Economy and the New Technology Trends

Business Process Management (BPM), Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Utility…

Mobile Speech Recognition as a Disruptive Technology

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…

Optimizing Viral Marketing: A Practical Approach

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 or innovation, and the goal is to trigger a…

Social Software Review Part 4: Spoke Software

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 representation of your relationships by…

SPSS acquires DataDistilleries

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…

Social Software Review Part 3: Ryze

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.

Social Software Review Part 2: LinkedIn

A review of LinkedIn, published six months after its launch.

social software

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 network. Lacking automatic integration to your email system and other communications tools, the site…

Social Software Review Part 1: Introduction to Social Network Software

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…

Requirements for Electronic Representation of Social Networks

With examples based on LinkedIn (as it were back in 2003)

It seems to me that the requirements for systems like LinkedIn, Friendster, and many others, all of…

A Definition of Collaborative CRM

Trust 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 may say. True as an event, but isn’t it…

Welcome Amazonians: Amazon facts and figures

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 was mentioned in the latest Amazon Web Services…

Where and how middlemen add value

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, squeezed out by price competition. While later observers tried to debunk the idea as…

New research paper: Business platforms

A new research paper is now available on this site. The paper, Business Platforms: Profiting From Networks discusses network effects and how…

William Gibson on Risk Management: It’s the only idea of our times

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.

Now is the time to cash in on CRM

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 (Customer…

Selling Software: Artisans of the world, unite!

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 on how to market and sell yourself in today’s business climate if you are a small, largely…

Linked: The New Science of 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…