Jan/Feb 2016

The data lake concept occupies a central place of prominence in contemporary big data initiatives. The past two years have unveiled numerous headlines, vendor solutions (including repackaging of former solutions) and enterprise use cases for the utility of this centralized approach for accumulating, analyzing and actuating big data.

• Sean Martin

To compete in the marketplace and maintain relevancy, companies need to constantly innovate. Just as important, today’s economic environment demands that innovation also consider how to design and transform delivery processes to improve productivity and performance. While there is a desire to be more global, integrated and customer-centric, actually getting new products and services to market are rare, and what we call frequent and radical innovations – new services and products that dramatically change the marketplace – are even rarer. For the past decade, many organizations have focused on traditional product innovation to address the challenges of globalization and economic transformation. Most of these companies are still clinging to what we call the invention model, centered on structured, bricks-and-mortar product development processes and platforms. If everybody is doing innovation, what are you doing differently?

• Haluk Demirkan
• Bulent Dal

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is not a new tool for marketers. Its application has been used for decades to understand a customer’s financial value. It comes in many shapes and sizes, varying from historical CLV, which calculates a CLV based only on what a customer has previously spent with a business, to predictive CLV, which leverages both observed historical behavior and predicted retention to estimate a discounted stream of future (lifetime) revenue.

• Matthew Lulay

When people think of railroads, what often comes to mind are thoughts of the American West with steaming locomotives chugging along endless miles of track interrupted only by the occasional train station. While railroads are not settling the Wild West anymore, they are continuing to break into new frontiers of trade, efficiency and innovation that find them pioneering and on the cutting edge of research and technology. Such is the case for today’s BNSF Railway, which is the product of nearly 400 different railroad lines that merged or were acquired during more than 160 years.

• Amy Casas

A thoughtful, deeply experience-based analysis by a retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer offers a new perspective on the political debate raging over how to defeat terrorism: “They’re all wrong.” What we need, he says, is a change in focus from conventional force, applied in support of national governments, to village stability operations (VSO), emphasizing developing local leadership and building from there.

• Doug Samuelson