Jan/Feb 2013

The pervasive influence of Facebook in the consumer market has prompted a rising tide of “enterprise social platforms” trying to bring social media into the workplace. Almost all the market entrants taking advantage of this trend are missing the point. The golden ticket for business value is not bringing external social media into the workplace. It is bringing work into the realm of social technology.

• Samir Gulati

The information explosion has led organizations to leverage data to improve the overall decision-making process. Organizations are looking to deploy data-driven strategies across their business processes and functions, such as marketing, risk, supply chain and finance. It’s critical now more than ever to have the right people, processes, methodologies, platforms and infrastructure that enable the institutionalization of analytics. In response to this a wide a range of players have come forth to help organizations with analytics.

• David Zakkam
• Deepinder Dhingra

The 2012 U.S. presidential election is over, and from a statistical viewpoint, the winner was a small group of people armed with analytics who out-predicted many so-called political experts (who relied mostly on gut instinct and experience). The election demonstrated that analytics fueled by big data and advancement in computing technology has become an integral part of the presidential campaign process. The real winner of the 2012 election is analytics.

• George Shen

After 20 years of consulting in the freight transportation arena, I joined Pacer Stacktrain as AVP of Equipment in 2003. One of the key responsibilities of our group was to determine how many chassis of each size (20 feet, 40 feet, 48 feet and 53 feet) needed to be positioned at each location across North America where Pacer containers would arrive on trains. At the time, Pacer had the largest domestic container fleet in North America with more than 27,000 containers. It also had contracts with its rail partners that allowed Pacer to provide its own chassis at rail terminals across North America. [Note: In the domestic intermodal marketplace, containers are designed to move around North America on trains, then be mounted on chassis at rail terminals in order to be transported from the rail terminal to the destination by trucks.]

• Bruce Patty

Decision Analysis Articles

• William Patchak