Sanjeet Choudary has put out a book about how platforms, not pipes, are the new business model. The book is very inspiring so I recommend reading it. There are not any new ideas in it but they are packaged together very nicely. It’s very much another “explaining things” book and for the lens that it wants you to use, I think it does a good job. The key thought behind the book is actually fairly simple: ...

Yesterday, my family went on a fishing trip. We keep a twenty-one foot, center console fishing boat over on the Eastern Shore just off the Chester River. The Chester feeds the Chesapeake Bay. The mouth of the Chester is about 1 mile north of the Bay Bridge. There were four of us, my wife and I and our two sons. I bought sandwiches and some chips at the nearby Safeway and we had each had our own water jugs. We brought 10 fishing poles. Four poles are heavy duty and are designed to catch larger fish deeper in the bay (around forty to fifty feet in the main channel). We had our planar boards with us to spread out the lines but we used them only once. ...

Since I am “recovering” data scientist, I thought that once in awhile, it would be good deviate from my more management consulting articles and eyeball the bigdata landscape to see if something interesting has happened. What!?! It seems like you cannot read an article without encountering yet another treatise on bigdata or at the very least, descriptions of the “internet of things.” That’s true, but if you look under the hood, the most important benefits of the bigdata revolution have really been on two fronts. First, recent bigdata technologies have decreased the cost of analytics and this makes analytics more easily available to smaller companies. Second, the bigadata bandwagon has increased awareness that analytics are needed to run the business. Large companies could long afford the investments in analytics which made corporate size an important competitive attribute. The benefits from analytics should not lead to a blanket and unthoughtful endorsement of analytics. Not every business process, product or channel needs overwhelming analytics. You want, however, analytics to be part of the standard toolkit for managing the value chain process and decision making. ...

After Russia and Ukraine ran into some issues a few months back, the US gathered international support and imposed sanctions. Most people think that sanctions sound like a good idea. But do they work? Whether sanctions work is a deeply controversial topic. You can view sanctions through many different lenses. I will not be able to answer that question in this blog. It is interesting to note that the sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine situation are some of the most complex in history. I think the trend will continue. Here’s why. ...

There was much todo about google’s bigdata bad flu forecasts recently in the news. google had tried to forecast flu rates in the US based on search data. That’s a hard issue to forecast well but doing better will have public benefits by giving public officials and others information to identify pro-active actions. Lets also think about other places where bigdata, in a non-corporate, non-figure-out-what-customers-will-buy-next way, could also help. Let’s think about Oso, Washington (Oso landslide area on google maps) ...