MIT Sloan Management Review

MIT Sloan School of Management recently held a two-day executive education course, Big Data: Making Complex Things Simpler, designed to provide organizations with both an overview of big data and a few techniques to harness some of the illusive power of data.

But in all the discussions that surfaced around the big issues from big data, the reality that many organizations grapple with is change management.

I am the proud recipient of an MIT Sloan Executive Education Course certification. Or, my avatar is.

MIT Sloan’s Big Data 4Dx executive education course, held simultaneously in Cambridge and in the virtual world this April, was the first ever to use a gaming interface. Think Second Life for the professional set.

Through the AvayaLive Engage platform, we online students were transported (as avatars) to a virtual auditorium, the classroom setting for the two-day Big Data: Making Complex Things Simpler course.

The surprising finding that 55% of big data analytics projects are abandoned comes from a recent survey of 300 IT professionals. The most significant challenge with analytics projects, according to the survey? Finding talent. Most (80%) of the respondents said that the top two reasons analytics projects fail is that managers lack the right expertise in house to “connect the dots” around data to form appropriate insights, and projects lack of business context around data.

During our webinar, we described those characteristics that define each group, and what your organization can do to become more like Analytical Innovators — if you’re not there already (in a poll, 13% of audience members identified themselves as Analytical Innovators).

As the hour-long webinar came to a close, we found that there were far more questions than we had time to answer. And we also found that there were far too many intriguing questions to let them go unanswered.

There are 52 million Latinos in the United States, with $1.5 trillion of purchasing power.

Entravision Communications Corporation a Spanish-language media company, reaches about 96% of that U.S. Latino audience through its numerous television and radio stations and digital platforms. It uses that extraordinary reach to provide media solutions to marketers interested in tapping into the Latino consumer market.

In a webinar recorded in March 2013, the speakers present findings from the recent global study they co-authored, “From Value to Vision: Reimagining the Possible with Data Analytics.” In their study, they identified leaders of the analytics revolution they call “Analytical Innovators.” These companies share three key characteristics: a widely shared belief that data is a core asset; more effective use of more data for faster results; and support for analytics by senior managers shift power and resources to those who make data-driven decisions.

IBM chairman, president and CEO Virginia Rometty has been making the rounds of late — in February she spoke at the annual IBM investor briefing; in March to the Council on Foreign Relations — espousing a bold new future built upon big data.

At the investors’ meeting, Rometty said that big data — defined as data streaming in to the worlds’ organizations from cloud, mobile and social networks (and presumably mingled with enterprise data) — will be the basis of competitive advantage for every company and every industry for the next decade.

Just before the New Year, New York Times writer Steve Lohr wrote a blog, Big Data is Great. But So Is Intuition, which addresses a question we here at MIT Sloan Management Review have been researching for the past year: With the growing potential of data and analytics, where is the shifting line between analytics and intuition?

Becoming an elite athlete — or coaching a team of this rarified breed — has as much to do with talent and skill as it does with experience and intuition (not to mention some serious hard work). And data is increasingly part of that mix at the highest echelon of sports: the Olympic Games. At Team GB analytics are used to both monitor the performance of athletes and to predict how well a team will perform. But what could the future hold? Evidence-based coaching — and training.

Based on a global executive survey with 2,500+ respondents and interviews with more than two dozen executives and academics, MIT Sloan Management Review and SAS Institute Inc. report on the distinctive characteristics and habits of companies that are very effective at using analytics to compete and innovate. This report offers an in-depth analysis of Analytical Innovators, the early leaders in the analytics revolution that is changing how many companies are managed.

Fortune 500 companies are rushing to make big data investments. Who is leading this charge? What are they doing? What are best practices and which practices should be avoided? A recent survey of C-level and function heads from Fortune 500 companies offers a unique glimpse into how the captains of industry are thinking about big data and how their companies are changing because of new insights gleaned from big data analyses.

Image courtesy of Flickr user barbtrek

Romantic love, big data analytics and…your personality at work? There is a correlation. And understanding it could help you communicate better with colleagues, bosses and clients. And get ahead.

A biological anthropologist and professor at Rutgers University, Helen Fisher has studied romantic love for thirty years.

Experts agree: Business and technology are on the cusp of a management revolution, brought on by big data and data analytics. A healthy dose of skepticism — and intuition — are required arsenal.

What can companies do to help fill their data scientist gap? That was the topic at a recent conference hosted by the MIT Center for Digital Business.

Companies are realizing that data analytics are now at the center of their organization, rather than the edge. That’s having an impact, according to Bruno Aziza of SiSense.

Walmart and Google are at work building their own versions of an analytics platform to help answer big business questions.

Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, talks about the big data revolution with Tom Davenport, who helped get that revolution started with his seminal article “Competing on Analytics.” Their discussion illuminates what’s different about big data and how big data is changing management and the way businesses run.

In the wake of the 2009 earthquake in L’Áquila, Italy, seven Italian scientists were convicted of manslaughter charges for not adequately communicating the potential threat.

Top data scientists often share three characteristics: they are creative, they are curious and they are competitive. Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, a company that hosts data prediction competitions, has figured out how to tap all three of these characteristics to help companies crowdsource their analytics problems.

Nate Silver, the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blogger, used a database of polling statistics to accurately predict the winner of all 50 states on the night of the U.S. election.
Image courtesy of JD Lasica, Socialmedia.biz.