Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

Stephen Few wrote a brilliant (and rather scathing) post recently: Big BI is Stuck: Illustrated by SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. In the post, he extensively quotes marketingspeak from various SAP executives and then picks apart their claims. He follows that part of the post with excerpts from a review of their new BusinessObjects Explorer that highlights [...]

I’ve been using an anecdote of late that Malcolm Gladwell supposedly related at a SAS user conference earlier this year: over the last 30 years, the challenge we face when it comes to using data to drive actions has fundamentally shifted from a challenge of “getting the right data” to “looking at an overwhelming array [...]

Some definitions (courtesy of Wiktionary):

status quo — the way things are, as opposed to the way they could be
inertia — The property of a body that resists any change to its uniform motion
cognitive dissonance — a conflict or anxiety resulting from inconsistencies between one’s beliefs and one’s actions or other beliefs

The first two of these can be applied [...]

Last week, I ended a post promising a future post on Type I vs. Type II errors when it comes to customer data management. I’ve found myself running into confusion on the distinction, with all customer data errors being treated as the same type, when they are not.
Let’s Start with Definitions
Wikipedia has a nice write-up [...]

I once had an operations management professor who asked the class how often we would expect a product to be defective if it was made of 10 components, each of which had a 1% defect rate, if a single component failure would result in the entire product not working.
The math is pretty simple:
99% x 99% [...]

Steve Woods of Eloqua invited me to write a guest post on his Digital Body Language blog after we’d gone back and forth a bit about contact data management and marketing automation. Over the past six or seven years, I’ve been thumped on the back of the ear with data management issues again and again. It [...]

I had a professor in business school who used to explain the relationship between the stock market and the bond market as a teeter-totter (in rural southeast Texas, I grew up knowing this as a see-saw): as the yields on one went up, the yields on the other went down and vice versa.Â
Managing your customer [...]

While not getting as much buzz as social media when it comes to hot topics for in 2009, “customer data management” is something that marketers are starting to take seriously. It’s easy to start envisioning fancy pictures of capturing and using customer data:

Using behavioral data to drive timely and relevant emails
Integrating information across different customer [...]

How’s that for a book title? Would it pique your interest? Would you download it and read it? Do you have friends or co-workers who would be interested in it?
Why am I asking?
Because it doesn’t exist. Yet. Call it a working title for a project I’ve been kicking around in my head for a couple of years. In [...]

I was in a presentation today where the presenter spoke enthusiastically and at length about how customer data is king — how companies that gather customer data (both explicit data provided by the customer, behavioral data collected about the customer, and external data acquired from third party sources) and put it together effectively can serve [...]