May 2008 - Posts

• CRM Analytics in Pharma

  Erika Morphy of CRM Buyer has an article about the deployment of CRM analytics in the pharmaceutical industry.  My colleague Ted Snyder mentions some of the challenges that deployment of analytics helps these organizations address: Pharma companies are also applying analytics to more basic, competitive issues, Snyder said. "They want to be able to react quickly to events. Scheduling something like a product launch is never a sure thing, because you can never depend on an approval's timing." On the other hand, if an already-approved product comes under review by the Food and Drug Administration, pharma companies need to be able to react with as much data on hand as possible, he continued. In these scenarios, "a lot of data needs to be analyzed very quickly. Then they have to execute on that strategy and enable their sales force appropriately," Snyder explained. Ancillary applications like call planning and and territory realignment come into play as well. A speedy analytics process has become a competitive advantage for these firms, he said. "Now they can analyze data within days instead of weeks." It's pretty clear that challenges like the ones that Ted describes aren't unique to the pharmaceutical industry.  To my mind, CRM is one of the best cases for user-friendly analytics.  In many situations, it's not necessary to build sophisticated models, it would be enough just to know which deals have changed status in the week, or to know which customers are your most frequent buyers.  Often that's much more difficult than it should be.  In the context of CRM what's often most important is being able to shift gears quickly and answer questions as they arise from analysis, and this tends to be better addressed by interactive visualization than statistical or predictive analytics. Posted May 19 2008, 10:50 AM by Tim Wormus with no comments

• Back From TUCON

  I'm just back from a busy week at TUCON.  This was the first one we've done where Spotfire has been part of the TIBCO family (the acquisition was announced at the same show last year), and I was really impressed by the event.  Bruce Silver has a good overview of some of the cool things that could be seen at the show (you won't be surprised to know that one of them was Spotfire). In my mind one of the most exciting things about the show was one that actually flew a bit under the radar.  Given what the news was competing with (the TIBCO messaging appliance announcement, discussion of TIBCO's increasing support for Microsoft, and a number of new product announcements), it's understandable.  However, I think it's the most game changing announcement that the BI industry has seen in sometime. Ta-da, presenting the first product integrating Spotfire with elements of the TIBCO stack--TIBCO Spotfire Operations Analytics.  It slices, it dices, it does everything but mow the lawn!  Well, and maybe not make you dinner either, but in all seriousness, Operations Analytics has the potential to revolutionize the way that we think about BI, "Pervasive Business Intelligence" in particular, and more generally, how those of us in the information business can deliver insight to our customers.  The software itself combines Spotfire with TIBCO's continuous event-processing technology, and enables line-of-business professionals to receive pre-specified, data-populated analysis applications in response to business events.  By doing so, Operations Analytics greatly simplifies the task of root-cause analysis, and then, by integrating with other business systems--your BPM queue, for instance--it also makes exception management a lot easier. Essentially, this is the most concrete realization of in-process analytics around, and the thing I like most about it is that nobody thinks of it as "Business Intelligence" per se.  It's just the application that simplifies their response to a problem in their process--regardless of what that process may be.   Posted May 13 2008, 03:53 PM by Tim Wormus with no comments

• Fun with Baseball

  Elaine Allen, a professor at Babson college and friend of Spotfire, and her colleague George Recck were recently interviewed by USA Today about their use of Spotfire in helping to build the ultimate fantasy baseball team.  Using Spotfire and other statistical tools, they looked for factors which indicate strong contributors to your fantasy baseball team. About a year and a half ago, she [Allen] and her students decided to see whether their studies could be applied to an important real-world topic, fantasy baseball. Using tools developed by the Spotfire division of Tibco Software, Allen and fellow professor George Recck used 21 statistical categories to determine an index value for each player. The conclusions were published last April and validated some long-held fantasy axioms. For example, consistency is more desirable than performance spikes. Another is that players who score a lot of runs (even if runs are not a category) help create a balanced and successful fantasy team. However, one of the surprising aspects of the research was a connection between some relatively minor statistics and a player's overall value. "Walks, doubles, caught stealing and strikeouts had a statistically significant (positive) impact on the index," Allen says. Not only is it great to have professors like Elaine and George using Spotfire in and out of the classroom, I love seeing the application of analytics to things like fantasy sports.  It's easy to think of it as just a "fun" example, but I think that both wide participation in fantasy sports and the acceptance of analytics over tradition by various professional sports franchises (the current World Series champions, the Boston Red Sox are just one analytically focused team--there are many more) have both played a big role in demonstrating to broad audiences how useful and effective analytics can be. Posted May 07 2008, 07:28 PM by Tim Wormus with no comments