May/June 2013

For many months after its passage by the U.S. Congress, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) witnessed a growing sense of uncertainty over its future. Stakeholders in the U.S. healthcare value chain didn’t take much action. Finally, two successive events in 2012 brought back the momentum. First, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the act. Then the U.S. presidential election results made sure that the act would stay and accelerate. Business stakeholders and millions of patients that can benefit from the ACA are now looking for the path forward.

• Rajib Ghosh
• Kylie Grenier
• Theo Ahadome

We are witnessing the emergence of a data-rich culture that has been made possible by intelligent devices, online commerce, social networks and scientific sensors – all ceaselessly creating, exchanging and collecting data. There is so much data that we have had to coin new words to describe the quantities – terabytes, petabytes, exabytes – just to keep up. What secrets can we divine from within this Everest of data, whether it leads to a responsive global supply chain or window into the souls of consumers? There is a need to make sense of it all, so perhaps it is no surprise that Google’s chief economist Hal Varian declares that statisticians surely have the “really sexy job” for the coming decade, for who better will there be to make sense of so much data? What is equally certain is that software tools will be needed to process and analyze the data.

• James J. Swain

While the focus of the team’s project work has certainly evolved over time, certain application areas – pricing, client retention, product propensity and revenue forecasting – are consistently important to the business and provide recurring projects.

• Russ Labe

Welcome to the Business Analytics (BA) Revolution. We live in an age of fast-paced decision-making, assorted market disruptions and information and misinformation overload. CEOs used to make about six or eight critical decisions involving the organization and products per year. Now, they make that number of comparable decisions every month or so. Meanwhile, torrents of data relentlessly rush in, generated by a digital revolution, which is characterized by hyper-connectivity and real-time decision-making. It all begs the question: “Where can we make the time to absorb this much information?” or is it another case of “I appreciate that it’s there, but I am not sure what to make of it.”

• Randy Bartlett
• Girish Malik

Which came first – attitude or behavior? This is a question researchers, marketers and product engineers are no longer trying to answer. Instead, the two elements are increasingly being fused to create a composite view of the customer. Behavioral inputs are detailed, accurate and real-time, while attitudinal inputs are measurable KPIs for a business. The insights resulting from integration can potentially influence a wide range of decisions at an individual customer or segment level.

• Jeff Ahlquist
• Kshira Saagar

Futurists enjoy taking out their crystal ball and projecting future innovations, but they are typically wrong. For example, George Orwell’s book, “1984,” which was published in 1949, did not come close with its projections. And in the 1960s, I recall a Walt Disney television show describing automobiles that required no driver and were guided by a magnet-like strip imbedded in the street’s or highway’s roadbed. Nice try.

• Gary Cokins