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Neil Raden

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Vice President & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research Group

155 points

Beginning as a property & casulaty actuary with AIG in New york, continuing with 25+ years as a consultant, analyst and author in the field of analytics including Business Intelligence, quantitative methods, decision management in a cross-section of industries.

Founder of ...

Beginning as a property & casulaty actuary with AIG in New york, continuing with 25+ years as a consultant, analyst and author in the field of analytics including Business Intelligence, quantitative methods, decision management in a cross-section of industries.

Founder of Hired Brains and author of "Smart (Enough) Systems," currently VP and Principal Analyst with Constellation Research Group covering BI, Analytics, BigData, Semantic Technology and Health Care Informatics

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WEB: Hired Brains Inc.

March 27, 2012

Neil Raden and 6 other people answered this question

What are the differences between business intelligence and analytics?

I'd disagree with some of these definitions:
1. BI is a centralized reporting platform for an organization and Analytics is insights intelligence for an organization
NR-BI is not always a platform. Consider Tableau Software, which hasn't had a server version until recently, but over 1000 ... more

Information Technology

Sept. 9, 2011

Neil Raden and 2 other people answered this question

How does big data analytics differ from traditional data warehouse analytics?

Technically, the difference is that BigData is predominantly "schema-less" meaning that instead of designing a data model and populating with data, BigData looks at big messy datasets and does a type of "late binding," meaning, it creates a schema from the data. The data is ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Sept. 9, 2011

Neil Raden answered this question

How do you tackle the problem of having numerous sources of the same data?

I'm assuming your question refers to the integration of these data sources, not the disparity in reporting from separate systems with an overlap in data.
This is why data warehousing or data federation or any other scheme that "reuses" data from other sources is so time-consuming ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Aug. 29, 2011

Neil Raden and 9 other people answered this question

Why should SMBs consider investing in BI and which kinds of SMBs don't need it?

First question: gamification. Personally, I find the whole idea a little gimmicky. To presume that getting people in your organization engaged in BI (where they are not now) by providing them with (valueless) awards, badges and notice seems a little far-fetched. Things like Farmville and ... more

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence & Analytics

Aug. 10, 2011

Neil Raden and 9 other people answered this question

Does 'big data' need to be better defined?

I don't know what's so special about Big Data. When we built data warehouses of 200+ GB in 1994, that was really big data. Maybe someone will come up with a different name but for me, Big Data implies the kind of data that we ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Aug. 9, 2011

Neil Raden and 4 other people answered this question at this roundtable

Self-Service BI, what does it look like? How do you evolve towards Self-Service BI? [8/9 @ 9:30 am]

So, can't BI tools be as easy to use as Excel?

Excel is easy to use in certain ways, but quite difficult in others. For example, I've seen entire departmental applications developed in Excel without data services or even indirection, so some poor slob spends two weeks every month updating the spreadsheets for distribution.
For individual users, ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Information Management

Self-service BI

Aug. 9, 2011

Neil Raden is speaking at this roundtable

Self-Service BI, what does it look like? How do you evolve towards Self-Service BI?

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Information Management

Self-service BI

July 11, 2011

Neil Raden is now following Wayne Eckerson and 1 other person

May 16, 2011

Neil Raden and 2 other people answered this question

Deloitte acquires SaaS BI provider Oco - thoughts? Does this news indicate a new trend?

Oco made a big splash, actually, the CEO made a big splash by picking a fight with another vendor. I think it was the now defunct LucidERA. That got them lots of publicity but they have since fallen of the radar. I didn't know they ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Cloud Computing

May 12, 2011

Hrvoje Smolic selected a best answer for

Reports vs Analysis

In almost every BI tool there is a potential to make static reports and ad-hoc analysis. Some tools are better in reporting, and other in analysis. From my experience (and yes, I was surprised), about 90% of users really need just static reports. Just to ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Dashboard Development

May 12, 2011

Neil Raden and 4 other people answered this question

What decisions should a business make with no regard for metrics?

Ethical decisions.
Before measuring the decline in your stock price, notify regulators that your offshore well is leaking.
Recall of defective product without measuring the cost
When learning you're dealing with a corrupt entity, pull the plug before projecting a P&L
A lot of strategic decisions are ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Feb. 3, 2011

Neil Raden and 3 other people answered this question

How come Business people are not data centric leaders? Or are they and I can't see it?

There is no way to generalize it. In my experience dealing mostly with large commercial enterprises, "leaders" don't really deal with problems that can be solved with data. Of course, the exceptions are certain kinds of companies where the leaders come from a numerate background, ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

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