Wiley and SAS Business

Unique insights to implement big data analytics and reap big returns to your bottom line. Focusing on the business and financial value of big data analytics, respected technology journalist Frank J. Ohlhorst shares his insights on the newly emerging field of big data analytics in Big Data Analytics. This breakthrough book demonstrates the importance of analytics, defines the processes, highlights the tangible and intangible values, and discusses how you can turn a business liability into actionable material that can be used to redefine markets, improve profits, and identify new business opportunities. - Reveals big data analytics as the next wave for businesses looking for competitive advantage. - Takes an in-depth look at the financial value of big data analytics. - Offers tools and best practices for working with big data. Once the domain of large on-line retailers such as eBay and Amazon, big data is now accessible by businesses of all sizes and across industries. From how to mine the data your company collects, to the data that is available on the outside, Big Data Analytics shows how you can leverage big data into a key component in your business's growth strategy.

For years, organizations have struggled to make sense out of their data. IT projects designed to provide employees with dashboards, KPIs, and business-intelligence tools often take a year or more to reach the finish line...if they get there at all. This has always been a problem. Today, though, it's downright unacceptable. The world changes faster than ever. Speed has never been more important. By adhering to antiquated methods, firms lose the ability to see nascent trends-and act upon them until it's too late. But what if the process of turning raw data into meaningful insights didn't have to be so painful, time-consuming, and frustrating? What if there were a better way to do analytics? Fortunately, you're in luck . . .Analytics: The Agile Way demonstrates how progressive organizations such as Google, Nextdoor, and others approach analytics in a fundamentally different way. They are applying the same Agile techniques that software developers have employed for years. They have replaced large batches in favor of smaller ones . . .and their results will astonish you.

Residents in Boston, Massachusetts, are automatically reporting potholes and road hazards via their smartphones. Progressive Insurance tracks real-time customer driving patterns and uses that information to offer rates truly commensurate with individual safety. Google accurately predicts local flu outbreaks based upon thousands of user search queries. Amazon provides remarkably insightful, relevant, and timely product recommendations to its hundreds of millions of customers. Quantcast lets companies target precise audiences and key demographics throughout the Web. NASA runs contests via gamification site Top Coder, awarding prizes to those with the most innovative and cost-effective solutions to its problems. Explorys offers penetrating and previously unknown insights into healthcare behavior. How do these organizations and municipalities do it? Technology is certainly a big part, but in each case the answer lies deeper than that. Individuals at these organizations have realized that they don't have to be Nate Silver to reap massive benefits from today's new and emerging types of data. And each of these organizations has embraced Big Data, allowing them to make astute and otherwise impossible observations, actions, and predictions. It's time to start thinking big. In Too Big to Ignore, recognized technology expert and award-winning author Phil Simon explores an unassailably important trend: Big Data, the massive amounts, new types, and multifaceted sources of information streaming at us faster than ever. Never before have we seen data with the volume, velocity, and variety of today. Big Data is no temporary blip of fad. In fact, it is only going to intensify in the coming years, and its ramifications for the future of business are impossible to overstate. Too Big to Ignore explains why Big Data is a big deal. Simon provides commonsense, jargon-free advice for people and organizations looking to understand and leverage Big Data. Rife with case studies, examples, analysis, and quotes from real-world Big Data practitioners, the book is a must-listen for chief executives, company owners, industry leaders, and business professionals.

Social media is having a major impact on marketing. It is the glue that leverages the consumer’s views and opinions across all elements of a retailers business. Retailers are becoming aware that social media offers promising ways they can benefit from it, such as improving brand awareness, listening to consumer sentiments, creating incentives to drive cross-channel traffic and purchases, building content-focused communities to improve loyalty, enticing consumers to try new products, understanding assortment preferences and improving customer service. Analytics are essential to a retailer’s success in leveraging social media and mobility. The amount of data produced by these new channels is explosive. Quick and effective analysis of this data and resulting actions are essential to achieving business benefit. Analytical tools exist for retailers to listen, learn, react and engage with consumers within and across social media, mobility and other channels. The more a retailer engages with these tools, the savvier it becomes about consumers and their preferences. Written in a blog format to help retailers experience interactive dialog in this rapidly growing communication vehicle, this book will create awareness of social networking and mobile technologies and the significant impact these channels are already having on retailers; provide specific examples of social media and mobility business applications ; explain why companies need to act now; describe the analytical tools necessary to make informed decisions on the data; demonstrate how to use social media to leverage brand equity across the entire business; and recommend a process for building a comprehensive strategy and action plan.

Unlocking the value of business analytics can be challenging complexity, uncertainty, and confusion are usually the norm, not the exception. True innovation and competitive advantage stem from navigating the razors edge between order and chaos. So how do those who succeed do it? Everyone faces the same challenges; success comes from balancing the benefits of unfettered creativity with the need to industrialize those same unstructured processes. The harsh reality is that most teams are not as effective at managing these competing pressures as they could be. With the information contained in this book, they would be. This book provides 30 design patterns (examples) to help guide those who would create value through business analytics. Practical advice is given to help understand: (a) how a variety of common problems can be solved; (b) the advantages of disadvantages of each choice; and (c) how these solutions typically create organizational value. Each Pattern will contain the following elements: (a) pattern diagram, (b) problem the pattern solves, (c) design intent behind the pattern, (d) description of the actors and entities involved in the pattern, (e) use case description, (f) benefits of the approach, (g) limitations of the approach, and (g) common business-related applications and the reason why the pattern creates value.

Eliminating misconceptions about what is really important for successful project financings, Project Finance for Business Development shows you how to develop, structure, and implement projects successfully by creating competitive advantage. By shedding light on project finance failures, it also helps you avoid failures of your own. - Offers a roadmap for successful financing, participant roles and responsibilities, and assessing and testing project viability - Considers project finance from a broad business development and competitive advantage - Provides a strategic decision-forecasting perspective - Delves deeper than existing treatments of project finance into decisions needed to create and implement effective financing plans Helping readers develop, structure, and implement projects successfully by creating competitive advantage, this book is a useful tool for project sponsors and developers, helping them structure and implement projects by creating competitive advantage.

Plain English guidance for strategic business analytics and big data implementation. In today's challenging economy, business analytics and big data have become more and more ubiquitous. While some businesses don't even know where to start, others are struggling to move from beyond basic reporting. In some instances management and executives do not see the value of analytics or have a clear understanding of business analytics vision mandate and benefits. Win with Advanced Analytics focuses on integrating multiple types of intelligence, such as web analytics, customer feedback, competitive intelligence, customer behavior, and industry intelligence into your business practice. • Provides the essential concept and framework to implement business analytics • Written clearly for a nontechnical audience • Filled with case studies across a variety of industries • Uniquely focuses on integrating multiple types of big data intelligence into your business Companies now operate on a global scale and are inundated with a large volume of data from multiple locations and sources: B2B data, B2C data, traffic data, transactional data, third party vendor data, macroeconomic data, etc. Packed with case studies from multiple countries across a variety of industries, Win with Advanced Analytics provides a comprehensive framework and applications of how to leverage business analytics/big data to outpace the competition.

All companies use information to set strategies and accomplish business objectives. But how many CEOs and CIOs would say they are satisfied that their companies get maximum value from information? Not many. How many have a systematic plan for evolving their information capabilities to the next level? Fewer still. SAS has developed an Information Evolution Model (IEM) to aid companies in assessing how they use information to drive business. The model outlines how information is managed and utilized as a corporate asset and enables organizations to objectively evaluate their use of information and accurately lay out a roadmap for improvements that optimize business returns. This book shows how the IEM can be used together with analytics. The book provides the necessary information that managers need to introduce and promote the use of analytics and insight across the organization and how to identify the starting point and develop a roadmap. Examples of global companies that have successfully been through this process are provided as well as best practices.