metrics

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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SAS finance architect is out to overhaul credit-scoring metrics

September 15, 2008

Some loan officers used to go by rules of thumb. There were “The Three B’s: never lend to beauticians, bartenders or barbers” and “The Three P’s: never lend to preachers, plumbers or prostitutes.” Now we have an automated system, but it can’t tell an upstanding banker from a down-on-his-luck bartender. Imagine a high-level banker who [...]

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The nose still knows better than Web 2.0

August 18, 2008

Several hundred practioners of the many aspects of business intelligence are gathering here in San Diego for this week’s TDWI conference. They know how to clean data, enable fast searches, design insight-accelerating tools and other wonders—and yet no one yet has a reliable metric to score restaurants. We still have to go out and sniff.

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How to pick a restaurant: the clean-door test

May 11, 2008

Rules of Thumb is a fine website for those of use who enjoy proxy metrics, the things you use to judge when you can’t judge the real thing. Picking a restaurant is an obsession on the site. One rule of its many rules is attributed to CBS’s Andy Rooney, who suggests you avoid cute names [...]

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A story here, a story there about “franken-measures”

April 12, 2008

I’ve almost got too much good stuff for my story in BI This Week about offbeat metrics. Stacey Barr, “the performance measure specialist” in Australia and Zach Gemignani at Juice Analytics in North Carolina both came through with insight-provoking cases. Zach calls metrics for those hard-to-reach places where bookkeepers don’t go “franken-measures.” Stacey calls them [...]

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Good metric-making aims for the concrete and sensory

April 9, 2008

If you want to come up with effective metrics, forget brainstorming. Drop the creativity. Done well, it’s an analytical exercise, says Stacey Barr, aimed at deriving concrete, sensory effects to measure.

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BI for the lone wolf

April 7, 2008

Who says one-person operations can’t use business intelligence? I don’t want MicroStrategy to outfit my tiny office, now near San Francisco, with its latest and greatest. No, but I do want a company like Intuit, ever more interested in the one-person market, to understand that money isn’t the only data individuals should track.

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Metrics your mother warned you about

March 31, 2008

I could easily find a parking place in Berkeley on Saturday! What could it mean? On a normal afternoon in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, I usually find just one space open, and often I have to drive around the block once…. Ah, it’s the end of Easter week and a bunch of the university people have [...]

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Sierra Club’s global cooling

March 27, 2008

The Sierra Club, once a leader in bottom-up organization, is about to flip over and assume a top-down orientation–in fact, one much like the big corporations it usually opposes.

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When economists say “slowdown”

March 23, 2008

If there’s one reliable sign that a recession is coming, it’s when the experts say they see none coming. I’ve survived four. “Oh, maybe a slowdown, yes…” they say. Now, in today’s New York Times, Charles Duhigg argues that what’s unlikely is a “full blown depression.” Quoth Duhigg: Why? Because so many of them have [...]

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