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Many companies have invested significantly in gathering vast amounts of data, yet they still struggle to extract insights, put them to work for the business and create truly data-driven organisations. The virtuous circle of data explores how organisations can spark a chain of events through top-down leadership and bottom-up employee engagement that creates a culture with data at the centre of decision-making.

Many companies have invested significantly in gathering vast amounts of data, yet they still struggle to extract insights, put them to work for the business and create truly data-driven organisations. The virtuous circle of data explores how organisations can spark a chain of events through top-down leadership and bottom-up employee engagement that creates a culture with data at the centre of decision-making.

What if you could structure the content of a web page based on how humans actually read those pages, Tung asked back in 2008 when he founded Diffbot?

Many companies are seeing that the future of deep learning is here, and that it doesn't require a lot of money or resources to take advantage of this new industrial science. IBM's Watson Analytics offers a freemium service that allows you to upload up to 500MB, and enables you to explore your own real-life applications for deep learning. Inputting Google Adwords or other sales metrics into this tool can help even startup companies find relational and predictive information in their data.

"The government wants to move towards a 'data culture' to make better spending decisions, says minister responsible for digital reform, Matt Hancock"

Michigan State University has over 450,000 alumni around the world. The school's University Advancement department sought to create a representation of alumni and donor sentiment and likelihood of philanthropic engagement based on data gathered from social media. However, these analyses often took weeks to process, limiting the school's ability to gather valuable insights in a timely manner. This case study describes how MSU leveraged business intelligence and predictive analytics to gain deep insight into an individual alum's potential to give, resulting in the following positive results: -An annual ROI of 55% -An average annual benefit of $34,434 -And more The case study purports to show how organisations can identify new opportunities for revenue generation by embracing a BI and predictive analytics strategy.

Amazon Web Services announced that it was selling to the public the same kind of software it uses to figure out what products Amazon puts in front of a shopper, when to stage a sale or who to target with an email offer. The techniques, called machine learning, are applicable for technology development, finance, bioscience or pretty much anything else that is getting counted and stored online these days. In other words, almost everything.

Predictive analytics for sales and marketing. Transforming big data into customer knowledge

Worth downloading and reading this paper. One abstract: "The ultimate goal is to enable data scientists,business analysts and other users "to extract the most information they can out of data as quickly as possible....For the business, we need answers now. The market is fixing the pace, so we have to give the best answer we can at the right time."

Whilst advocating the use of storytelling to illustrate key facts in data, the article highlights the detrimental side of storytelling, which can undermine good decision making. When we are trying to build a story from data we fail to recognize that most stories we are supposed to glean from data cause cognitively dissonance.

You can start getting familiar with Watson Analytics by using the sample datasets provided in this community. These datasets have all been tested with Watson Analytics, and are the basis for many of the Watson Analytics demonstrations and videos. A description of each is below. To use the datasets, download them from the links below. Then, access Watson Analytics and from the Welcome Page, tap Add and add your data.

McKinsey have developed an approach to retention: to detect previously unobserved behavioural patterns, they combine various data sources with machine-learning algorithms. Workshops and interviews are used to generate ideas and a set of hypotheses. Over time they collected hundreds of data points to test. Then ran different algorithms to get insights at a broad organisational level, to identify specific employee clusters, and to make individual predictions. Finally they held a series of workshops and focus groups to validate the insights from our models and to develop a series of concrete interventions. The insights were surprising and at times counterintuitive. They expected factors such as an individual's performance rating or compensation to be the top predictors of unwanted attrition. But analysis revealed that a lack of mentoring and coaching and of "affiliation" with people who have similar interests were actually top of list. More specifically, "flight risk" across the firm fell by 20 to 40 percent when coaching and mentoring were deemed satisfying.

McKinsey have developed an approach to retention: to detect previously unobserved behavioural patterns, they combine various data sources with machine-learning algorithms. Workshops and interviews are used to generate ideas and a set of hypotheses. Over time they collected hundreds of data points to test. Then ran different algorithms to get insights at a broad organisational level, to identify specific employee clusters, and to make individual predictions. Finally they held a series of workshops and focus groups to validate the insights from our models and to develop a series of concrete interventions. The insights were surprising and at times counterintuitive. They expected factors such as an individual's performance rating or compensation to be the top predictors of unwanted attrition. But analysis revealed that a lack of mentoring and coaching and of "affiliation" with people who have similar interests were actually top of list. More specifically, "flight risk" across the firm fell by 20 to 40 percent when coaching and mentoring were deemed satisfying.

Data analytics will no yield results if the output is mistrusted, or if the organisation is not geared-up to respond. 

Tour of Watson Analytics