Is it just me, or are we making some big mistakes in how we talk about big data? This crossed my mind (yet again) as I read Straight Talk About Big Data. The article starts with a suggestion for the CEO to get 5 questions answered from the executive team: Do we have a value-driven analytics strategy? Do we have the right ‘domain data’ to support our strategy? Where are we in our journey? Are we modelling the change personally?…
As mentioned in the previous post, last week I attended the Data Leadership Summit – http://www.datasummit.ca in Vancouver. It brought together a diverse audience to see speakers from different industries with different perspectives and experiences. In my opinion, there were two presentations which were particularly compelling. One was from real estate brokerage Redfin, the other from the online dating service Plentyoffish. I found it interesting that both shared many common themes. For instance, the level of exaggeration when one describing…
Mathias Dopfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, raised the issue about the uneasy relationship between Google and publishing companies. Axel Springer, a German media powerhouse, publishes over 200 newspapers and magazines; and derives 62% of their profits from their digital business. As you can imagine, Axel Springer depends heavily on the traffic supplied by search engines, most notably Google. Mathias (quite rightly) points out that the search results and ads serving algorithms are not transparent; and anyone with a business…
