Those occupied brain cells prove useful after all

One of the recent readings in my Business Analytics class was a Harvard Business Review article by Eric Bonabeau called "Don't Trust Your Gut," (free registration required for full article) an excellent read discussing cognitive biases and software models for analytical decision making, including artificial evolution and interactive evolution.

When I was reading it, I got to the section of the article about "agent-based modeling," specifically the quote ""a computer creates thousands, even millions, of individual actors; each of these virtual agents makes decisions, providing an accurate model of a complex system's dynamics," (p. 120), and I immediately thought of an article I once read about a software program designed based on how ants navigate.  Ants lay down a pheremone trail that fades quickly, and if one finds food, when others follow the trail the scent is reinforced, which strengthens it and attracts more ants.  They end up being very efficient at finding the best routes.  And the software was modeled on this and used for determining things like efficient delivery routes.  But of course, I read the article some time ago, before I used Evernote to track things I read and interesting quotes.  So I had no idea where or when I'd read it.  But it had been taking up space in my memory for a while, and there have been several times when I've wished I could remember the source.

Well, a few days ago I decided to try google it, especially when I thought I remembered something about traffic in Brazil being an example in the article.  Well, when I googled "ants software brazil traffic," I got to an article in the Economist that talked about swarm intelligence and the work of Dr. Marco Dorigo in creating software modeled on how complex social insects solve problems.  Now, I don't think this is the exact article I read, but it has much of the same information.  So I googled Dr. Dorigo.

And what do you know, but in the top three "Scholarly articles" on the results page, there are two articles co-authored by Dr. Dorigo and Eric Bonabeau, the very author who inspired my search in the first place!  And now I have articles and names to cite to the next time I need them.

And another similar example - in my first discussion post in Business Analytics, I had made mention of software that used analytics to predict music hits.  I didn't know where I'd initially read about it, but some googling at least found me some relevant materials on Mike McCready and the companies he's used the software with.   Well, in last week's discussion, the instructor mentioned Epagogix, a company that predicts movie hits based on the scripts, and she mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell had written about them.  Then another classmate (thanks, Aric!) posted a link to a 2006 video of Gladwell speaking at the New Yorker festival about Epagogix and their hit predictions.  In that video, he also mentions Mike McCready and his music hit predictor.  And I recognized everything in the video, though I know I'd never seen it.  So I checked Gladwell.com for his 2006 articles, and sure enough, there it was, "The Formula," the article I'd initially read from which I remembered the story of the music hit predictor.  Over 5 years I'd been remembered that article.

Finally, another memory loop closed.  And at least those occupied brain cells were put to good use.  I've gotten good grades on all my discussion posts for class so far, which included references to and discussions of the above articles.  :)

I am LOVING the fact that the all the things I've been interested in for *years* are turning out to be completely applicable to my current studies. :)

Updated - Plea for Volunteer: Need a Company to be subject of a Business Analytics class project

UPDATE: I have a victim!  Thank you to everyone who made introductions and connections for me, I really really really really appreciate the help!  I'm looking forward to the projects for this class.

Now all I have to do is come up with the topic for my Capstone Project...

Greetings,

I'm putting my full plea here on my blog so I can link to it from other places.  I have a couple upcoming projects to do for my Business Analytics class at Columbia (part of my Master's in Information and Knowledge Strategy).  The course is taught by Jeanne Harris, a top consultant at Accenture in their Institute for High Performance, and a co-author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning and Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results.

Since I'm currently job hunting, I don't have a workplace at which to perform my analysis, so I'm looking for a willing victim.  :)  From the project descriptions (copied below), most of the information gathering will need to be done in the next week.  I'll need to be able to interview managers or other decision-makers within a company about how they make decisions, what data they gather and analyze to aid in their decision-making, and how use of data factors into organizational strategy.  I can evaluate any kind or size of business.  The benefit to your company would be written analyses of your organization's analytical capabilities, and a proposal for how the organization could improve the maturity level of their analytical capabilities.  The first week will be the main data gathering, but it's possible (maybe likely) that I'll need to perform some follow-up in the later weeks in order to fine tune the maturity level improvement proposal.

If your company, or someone you know, would be interested in a free analysis of your analytic capabilities, please contact me asap.  If you go to view my profile, there's an "email me" link to my gmail address.  Or you can email me at my student address, aea2146 AT columbia.edu.  Or, if you scroll waaaayyyyyy down to the bottom of the blog, the image of the front of my networking card has my gmail addy and phone number on it.  

Thank you!

Alexis 

Analytical Assessment project:

In your first assignment for this course, you will assess the degree of your organization’s analytical completion. You will use this analysis in your second assignment (due later in the semester) to help you think through how you might build on this capacity.

To complete this assignment, do the following:

1. Research your organization’s approach to analytics and decision making. You may need to talk to managers about how they make decisions. What kind of data do managers look at when they make decisions? What kind of data is available? To whom and how do they have to justify their decisions? As you research, continue to look deeper at the use of data in the organization: how does data drive strategy?
2. Consider the primary attributes of analytical competitors from the Competing on Analytics text.Which of these four attributes is your organization exhibiting? As you define the presence of any of all of the four, use examples from your research to demonstrate why you believe they exist or do not exist.

3. Define what stage of analytical competition your organization is currently operating under. Be sure you have read the description of these five stages in Competing on Analytics. Defend your assessment.

4. Finally, define what stage of analytical competition you would select as your organization’s desired state. Not every organization is seeking to be a Stage 5 organization. Based on what you know about leaders in your industry and your own organization’s positioning, what would you recommend as a goal for your organization? Defend your assessment.

Your analysis should be a cohesive, three to five-page essay. You will submit your paper to the course dropbox by Sunday, February 12 and 11:59 pm, ET. You will receive your graded assignment by February 15 so that you can begin working on your next assignment.

IMPORANT NOTE: I am aware that this assignment asks you to describe data usage and business processes that you may not feel comfortable sharing with your colleagues. Please understand that when you submit your project to the course dropbox, your instructor and facilitator are the only people who have access to these assignments. At no point will I ask you to share these papers or their content with the other members of your cohort.

Analytical Improvement Plan project:

In your first assignment for this course, you assessed the degree of your organization’s analytical competition and defined its goal state. Now, you will use this information to develop a plan for how you might build on this capacity and help you reach your desired stage of competition. To do this, you will follow the DELTA model described in Analytics at Work and covered in this course during Units 4 through 10. I recommend that you write your paper piece by piece as we go through each module of the course. That will allow you to take advantage of the optional DELTA forums for posting your questions about the content and will help you to manage your time. You will submit your final, cohesive paper on March 18 at 11:59 pm, ET. 

To complete this assignment, you will do the following:

1. Apply each DELTA component to your organization’s analytic maturity. I recommend you work through your paper each week as you progress through these units. As you learn more about each component of the model, answer the following questions: At what stage is your organization relative to this specific DELTA component? For example, your organization may be at a Stage 3 when it comes to Data use but may be far more primitive in its Leadership commitment to analytics. What would it look like if your organization were to move from its current stage to the desired stage? Think both about how your course text describes each phase and what it would look like in the specific context of your organization. What recommendations can you provide that would help your organization advance to this next stage? Your text and our discussions may lead to some concrete items, but I am looking for you to use these as foundational suggestions and to develop innovative, targeted ideas for how you might improve the use of analytics in your own organization.

2. Synthesize your plan and define a holistic rationale for your conclusions. Look realistically at the plans you have developed for how each of these components can be used to strengthen your organization’s capacity. How will you structure an intervention plan that you can deploy as your organization’s knowledge leader?  Explain the overall impact this plan might have on your organization’s strategic use of analytics. Please note that this is very important: I am far more interested than how you see analytics impacting strategic decisions (approaches to products, markets, customers, etc.) than how you see them impacting specific tactics (pricing, transactional items, etc.).  Your analysis should be a cohesive, 5-7-page essay. You will submit your paper to the course drop box by March 18 at 11:59 pm, ET. I will return this paper with comments before our live session during the final week of the course.

IMPORANT NOTE: I am aware that this assignment asks you to describe data usage and business processes that you may not feel comfortable sharing with your colleagues. Please understand that when you submit your project to the course drop box, your instructor and facilitator are the only people who have access to these assignments. At no point will I ask you to share these papers or their content with the other members of your cohort.

Teenage girls' new fave pasttime - curing cancer?

Recently browsing the interwebs, I came across a Huffington Post article about high school student Angela Zhang, who won the $100,000 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, with a method to use nanotechnology to detect and destroy cancer tumors.  And with a little further browsing, I found a Scientific American article about Shree Bose, who won The $50,000 Google Science Fair with yet another cancer treatment.

I'll admit that 2 is too small a sample size to really say whether the fact that Angela and Shree are female has anything to do with their wins beyond coincidence.  But it's certainly a positive sign, when there seems to have been a lot of lamenting that there aren't as many women entering the STEP disciplines as men.  And even more noteworthy than that, I think, is just how advanced a level of research some high school students are both able to do, and interested in doing.  

This is many worlds beyond the old baking soda volcano.  And I would bet that these capabilities owe no small debt to the evolution of technology and collaboration, and the democratization of information and access to information that ye olde internet has wrought.  Angela Zhang mentioned in the HuffPo article that she started reading doctorate-level bioengineering works when she was a freshman in high school.  I'd be willing to bet that it was a lot easier for her to find and access such publications than it would have been for me 20 years ago.  The internet alone, plus the developments of search engines like Google, have surfaced so much more information to the masses than would have been easily findable prior to their arrival.  I might have been able to find those sorts of articles if I had wanted to, but it would have required a much greater investment of time and travel for me than it likely did for Angela.  In the time it would have taken me to locate and get hold of such articles (and decipher them), Angela was already beginning her research.  

It's always been possible for highly motivated people to accomplish amazing things.  But what's truly amazing, and really quite promising, is how quickly technology enables those motivated people to get to the meat of what they're interested in accomplishing.  And it can substantially reduce the threshold for less motivated folks to get to something interesting and valuable before they lose their motivation.  Which all ultimately benefits society.

Just imagine, if these young women are successfully working on curing cancer at age 17 or 18, how much more might they accomplish in another 40, 50, 60 or more productive years of their lives?

Dare we hope that such accomplishments create a virtuous cycle of increasingly ambitious young people?  If two teenage girls can cure cancer (okay, that's a bit hyperbolic, but still, their work is significant), perhaps more high schoolers will realize just how much they can accomplish if they want to.  And of course it's not only high schoolers who can do amazing things, but if significant discoveries start being made by more and more younger people, just think how many more productive years that essentially adds to all sorts of fields of study.  5-10 extra years of practical contribution is a lot, and multiply that by thousands of young people, and you have a lot of potential benefit to society.

Cheers to Angela and Shree for being a big part of that potential!