creative analysis

Mapping the many faces of “retention”

January 15, 2010

Everybody knows what “retention” means until they have to design a metric. Ken Rudin, once of LucidEra and now general manager of analytics at the games site Zynga, thought that he and his team could “put something together” quickly — but it actually took “four solid weeks of discussion and debate.” About 50 million people [...]

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Be a strategist, not a “geek”

December 22, 2009

Data analysts who simply explain the data and ignore managers’ real needs risk losing “strategist” status &mdash: and become just a “geek.”

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No wizard, just you and the data

November 3, 2009

What’s the hardest part of training a new data analyst? Resetting the trainee’s mindset. “They start out with the idea that there’s a right answer,” says Joe Mako. Joe’s leaving his job — where about one year ago he began analyzing data — to go work for the producer of Lyza. Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis [...]

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Stalking the why: selling visual analysis

October 21, 2009

How do you show the value of visual analysis to business people? Dan Murray can show it in demos, but he keeps looking for the “magic dust” that explains in a snap. He sees visual analysis as a key part of low-cost business intelligence at small- and medium-sized organizations — and he’s set out with [...]

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Spam barely pays, says spamalytics

September 22, 2009

With all that email that piles in for vi*gra and unlucky Nigerian princes, we assume that someone, somewhere, makes tons of money on it all. But some stealthy University of California researchers at Berkeley and San Diego concluded that spammers may be easier to thwart than we thought.

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Data analysts and journalists

September 10, 2009

“Heroic analysts” and journalists keep running into each other, at least in my mind. I realized that two scribbles from last Sunday about journalism can also be about data analysis: • “… the most precious gems gathered in any journalistic journey are frequently those found around the edges of a story.” • ” … the [...]

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Denial of access explained

August 25, 2009

The week before last, I told about the young data analyst who got the door slammed in his data-seeking face, and I asked “why?” This week, a veteran of the data business answered.

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Denial of access

August 14, 2009

I hear a story like the one I heard this week and I want to ask the apparent villain why. There must be a reasonable explanation. At first glance, he’s like other managers I’ve known of who throttle promising work for what seems like a personal need for control. “So tell me,” I’d like to [...]

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Analyst: creative or canned?

July 31, 2009

I picked up the term “creative analyst” in late June on the phone with Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis. But what does he mean? He described one analyst he’s known of. This guy arrived at a new job with strong recommendations for his ability to tear apart a dataset. He could slice, dice, build related charts [...]

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Analysts run on “maker’s schedule”

July 29, 2009

Most of those versatile researchers of the data-driven world — the business analysts, creative analysts, or even cowboy analysts — probably run on a different schedule from their managers. Paul Graham’s latest essay compares “manager’s schedule” and “maker’s schedule.” I’m no analyst, just a writer. But the more analysts I meet, the more I find [...]

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