INFORMS Today: The Podcast Series

How well do you use analytics? The creators of the INFORMS Analytics Maturity Model discuss what you can do to improve your company’s analytics.

What does the year 2015 hold for those of us in this exciting tech field?

What do new techniques of capturing your personal data mean to your privacy?

How should a business leader interested in Big Data – whether a newcomer or a professional with analytics experience – develop and implement a major Big Data initiative?

Predicting mass killings and genocide so that international bodies can intervene and prevent disaster.

When former INFORMS President Brenda Dietrich and two colleagues contemplated ways to explain the myriad possibilities for organizations to use analytics, they decided to exemplify their ideas by opening the IBM vault and sharing highlights of how they had used analytics internally to solve difficult business problems.

High employee turnover is bad for business. Predictive analytics can help you hire employees most likely to remain with your organization and flag veteran employees who may depart. The benefit goes straight to return on investment. Hear Talent Analytics’ Greta Roberts on why analytics is becoming an important part of human resources and contributing to the bottom line.

What happens when that slightly used holiday gift is fraudulently returned?

Heineken is a popular beer in the U.S. and across the world not only because of its qualities as a beer but also because of the marketing acumen used to bring it to the public.

When Innovative Decisions, Inc. (IDI) committed 11 of its analysts to go for INFORMS CAP (Certified Analytics Professional) certification, it set both a record and an example for other consulting groups and corporations to follow.

Showing young people how to avoid the disastrous choices that can ruin lives – and make the kinds of decisions that help them navigate this most difficult period in a person’s life using ahoona.com, a social network that helps teens share their decision dilemmas and solutions with their peers.

HR departments routinely collect information about their employees. But what happens when they use predictive analytics to predict if someone might leave the company – and that someone is you?

A heated political controversy in the U.S. surrounds the amount of regulation that government should apply to private industry. A corollary to the issue is a question: can't we all get by with self-regulation? A study in the Oct issue of Management Science draws strong conclusions from experiments conducted by three researchers. Find out what the investigators would recommend to the U.S. Congress.

In a new study, Analytics Skills, Tools, and Attitudes 2013: Analytics capabilities needed now and in the future, Lavastorm Analytics takes a deep look into the way that organizations are employing analytics, what skills gap remains, and what departments are using analytics talent.

Do you want to hire a single analytics professional – or start an analytics department? Using analytics to identify analytics professionals, the HR consultants Talent Analytics have identified the key characteristics of successful analytics professionals.

Sometimes our perceived virTue are really our faults. Kicking bad work habits that masquerade as virTue is the theme of Tipping Sacred Cows by Duke Corporate Education's Jake Breeden. Breeden touched on his suggestions for analytics and O.R. professionals in a videotaped session during the 2013 INFORMS Analytics Conference. He offers more insights into how to improve your soft skills in this interview.

What do business people need to know about working with analytics and O.R. people if they want the working relationship to be successful? Tom Davenport, who co-authored the groundbreaking Competing on Analytics, is back with a new title, co-written with Jinho Kim: Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding Analytics + Using Analytics. Hear him discuss his new title and his new position on the INFORMS CAP Analytics Certification Board in this new podcast.

Doing the calculations is one part of your job as an analytics professional. Communicating your results to colleagues and those outside your field is another, and it can be difficult using words and diagrams to make your most important results understandable to others. In this podcast, Evan Levine, the author of Fundamental Principles of Analytic Communication, which appears in Analytics Magazine, and the new Applying-Analytics: A Practical Introduction, discusses four principles of communicating analytics, and how you can achieve them. Make sure you master them.

Sometimes academics publish and wonder if anyone out there is reading. In the case of Eric Bickel of the University of Texas, he found that one person was. Early in his career Bickel did research on sports analytics/O.R., specifically strategies for baseball players at the plate and their managers. He asked, when should a batter take a pitch? In 2009 he published a related paper in Decision Analysis. Afterward, he received a thank you from a minor league catcher who had begun following his advice. It turns out that that player was Evan_Gattis, now the hot rookie with the Atlanta Braves, and when Sports Illustrated covered Gattis' remarkable first year, it wrote about Bickel's influence on Gattis' hitting. Learn more about this remarkable experience in this new podcast.

Big Data provides big challenges, even for experts in advanced analytics and operations research. In this segment recorded at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research that took place in San Antonio this spring, Brian Keller of Booz Allen Hamilton jumped in with a talk entitled, “Getting Started with Big Data Analytics.” Listen to him as he examines systems, software, and the many ingredients that you can use to implement Big Data solutions.

Like it or not, the Affordable Care Act – dubbed Obamacare by detractors and supporters alike – will become the law of the land in the United States in less than a year. How are hospitals beginning to cope with important data management requirements? How are healthcare analytics professionals guiding hospital administrators as they prepare for a brave new future? Listen to former INFORMS President President Don Kleinmuntz of Strata Decision Technology explore the growing role of analytics and hospital management in this broad-ranging interview recorded at the 2013 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics.

One of the challenges for an expert in any specialized field is explaining highly technical information to internal and external clients. This has been a longstanding problem for consultants in analytics and operations research who work with business people who can’t understand the field’s highly mathematical framework. At the 2013 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research Carrie Beam of Carrie Beam Consulting. gave a workshop with solid advice for analytics consultants who need to find a common language with clients. Afterward, she sat down to record this useful podcast. Listen and learn.

In an era when unstructured data from video and other formats is becoming increasingly available for examination, the power of analytics to yield important recommendations is growing. In a column published in the current issue of the INFORMS publication Analytics Magazine, Atanu Basu of Ayata provides valuable advice on using prescriptive analytics. In his second Science of Better podcast, hear him provide some essentials tips.

English physicist Patrick Blackett had served in the Royal Navy during WWI, leaving to study physics at Cambridge. He brought both experiences to his development of operations research on behalf of the United Kingdom, fighting against a devastating sea campaign that threatened to cripple his country’s economy. In Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare, author Stephen Buidansky tells the story of Blackett, also highlighting the contributions of American Philip Morse. Listen to this fascinating interview with Stephen Budiansky about one of the inventors of operations research.

Sure operations research and analytics are connected. But when it comes down to professional skills - the hard technical skills and the soft skills that business people need - how similar, and different are practitioners of the two? In a new examination of a survey completed by INFORMS members that appears in the March issue of the INFORMS journal Interfaces, Matthew Liberatore and Wenhong Luo of Villanova University highlight differences in hard skills and similarities in soft business skills. Hear them clearly define the two professions in this enlightening podcast.

Some Americans might find relief and delight in eliminating TV ads from presidential campaigns. But the effect of advertising, especially in close contests, can be important enough to put the best advertiser in the White House. Brett R. Gordon of Columbia University and Wesley R. Hartmann looked at the campaigns of 2000 and 2004 in their study, Advertising Effects in Presidential Elections, which appears in the current issue of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science. Hear them explain the subtle distinctions between product advertising and political advertising, and how one advertising campaign was key to winning office.

Big Data is creating big opportunities – and also big challenges for executives and managers at companies who have decided to make an investment in analytics software but need guidance making an expensive choice among varied solutions.Michael Gualtieri, the Principal Analyst serving Application Development and Delivery Professionals at Forrester Research, is the principle author in a Forrester report entitled The Forrester Wave: Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions Q1 2013. Hear him preview the report in this podcast.

If you're in government, product marketing, or any field that craves insight into what the public feels, you probably use sentiment analysis, which assesses whether an article or blog entry or online review is positive, negative, or neutral and draws macro conclusions from all the data. But developing an algorithm or model to understand the nuance of language is still a skill in its infancy. Maksim Tsvetovat of Deepmile Networks and George Mason University believes that current methods have serious flaws. He offers a unique approach in Implicit Sentiment Mining, an article he co-authored with Jacqueline Kazil and Alex Kouznetsov. It appears in the current issue of ORMS Today. You'll gain insight into the current state and the future promise of sentiment analytics in this insightful podcast.

The traditional method of brainstorming is great for generating ideas - up to a point. With its time limit and lack of guidance to participants, some ideas don't get expressed, so they can't be considered when decision time comes along. INFORMS decision analysis pioneer Ralph Keeney, Professor Emeritus at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, makes his recommendations about improving the brainstorming process in his study Value-Focused Brainstorming, which appears in the current issue of Decision Analysis. He explains his important new method in this revealing podcast.

If you discovered a technology that could increase your return on assets by as much as 15% wouldn’t you adopt it? Surprisingly, a minority of Fortune 1000 companies actually target their customers and make better decisions using analytics in their marketing decisions. Gary L.Lilien, a leading force in the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science and former president of the INFORMS predecessor society TIMS, explains the surprising results in an upcoming study, Performance Implications of Marketing Analytics, co-authored by Arvind Rangaswamy and Frank Germann.

Big Data is becoming a source of new insights, growth, profit, and better customer service – for organizations that know how to use analytics to explain all that data. The IBM Institute for Business Value, together with the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, issued a white paper, "Analytics: The real-world use of Big Data. How innovative enterprises extract value from uncertain data." Listen to Michael Schroeck, a partner and vice president for IBM Global Business Services, as he explains the important findings.

With memories of the terror attacks of Sepember 11, 2001 now receding, the threat of future attacks remains real. At the INFORMS annual meeting in Phoenix, legendary air safety expert Arnold Barnett of MIT's Sloan School stressed the continued danger of attacks on subway and rail systems. He went on to encourage intelligence services to continue operations to prevent attacks on mass transit like those that took place in London, Madrid, and Mumbai. Hear his unique take on the continued peril of terrorist attack.

Pollsters predict a neck-and-neck contest between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Governor Mitt Romney on Election Day. So why are two operations researchers so confident that President Obama can't lose? In this podcast, listen to American University Professor Allan Lichtman, author of Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2012, and University of Illinois Professor Sheldon Jacobson, whose election forecasting website is at http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/index.html. More about their methods is in an upcoming issue of ORMS Today and an article by Doug Samuelson in the current issue of Analytics Magazine. You can hear them in person at the 2012 INFORMS Annual Meeting at this special workshop.

Michael Lewis may have created a sensation around sports analytics in his bestseller and the movie starring Brad Pitt, but there's a much bigger story to be told. Interfaces, the INFORMS journal, has published a two-part issue devoted to ways that math modeling can improve performance and the business of sports. The previous issue of the journal was devoted to a range of O.R. sports research and the current issue is devoted to sports scheduling. Listen to co-editors Michael Fry of the University of Cincinnati and Jeffrey Ohlmann of the University of Iowa talk about measuring driving and putting excellence in golf, improving baseball player drafts, why goalies rule, and more.

Moving to a pay per click system in online advertising, especially if that means pay per sale, was meant to reduce the cost of ads and make the whole system more efficient. Then why does the system actually lower revenue and profits? In his June, 2012 study in the INFORMS journal Management Science, Chrysanthos Dellarocas of Boston University explains the phenomenon of double marginalization - and how he would fix it.

Almost half the industry leaders cited in the 1982 best-seller "In Search of Excellence" no longer exist or are badly underperforming. What goes into the decline of a company? And how does shortsightedness in the application of analytics contribute to these kinds of downfalls? Listen to SAS consultant Gary Cokins, the author of "Why Do Large, Once-Successful Companies Fail?" in the current issue of Analytics Magazine and a piece about the obstacle course for analytics that appeared earlier this year in ORMS Today as he casts light on the make or break power of analytics.

American manufacturing is doing better than many pundits credit, and it can grow still further - but will American policymakers take the steps needed? Or will the glory days when America was the "Arsenal of Democracy," fade further still? The University of Michigan's Tauber Institute for Global Operations and Booz & Co. collaborated on a report, Manufacturing's Wake-Up Call. Listen to former Management Science editor-in-chief Wally Hopp and Tauber co-director Roman Kapuscinski in this look at the American economy from the perspective of two respected management scientists.

Experts in analytics and operations research have long argued that you cannot properly understand a phenomenon unless you can apply metrics that explain it in numbers. U.S. Army Major Rob Dees strongly believes that this concept also applies to the Department of Defense obtaining and retaining the best fighting men and women. A researcher for the Mayo Clinic and speaker at a session during this month's INFORMS Conference on Analytics, Major Dees speaks at length in this podcast recorded at the INFORMS Huntington Beach conference.

In the B2B environment, social media has risen to a whole new importance for marketers. In a preview of her presentation at the 2012 INFORMS Conference on Analytics this April, Theresa Kushner, the Senior Director of Customer Intelligence at Cisco, explains how Cisco is going beyond analyzing traditional online metrics to better understand its customers and retain market share in an increasingly competitive environment. Hear her discuss Connecting the Stars: Applying Social Media Understanding to a Structured Marketing Data Environment in a B2B World.

It's spring, and a young man's fancy turns to, well, um, college basketball. Operations researchers are here to make sure your heart's desire (winning your office pool) comes true. Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign returns this year to share his approach to bracketology, the forecasting of odds in the NCAA Men's Division Basketball Championship. Listen to him and visit his website at bracketodds.cs.illinois.edu. You can even revisit his 2011 appearance with Georgia Tech's Joel Sokol by clicking here.

Women are finally beginning to rise above the barriers that once kept them from leadership in major organizations. How does the new generation of women leaders differ from their male counterparts? From women in the general population? In today's podcast, Renée Adams of the University of New South Wales and Patricia Funk of Universitat Pompeau Fabra and Barcelona Graduate School of Economics discuss their new study, Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Does Gender Matter?, which appears in the current issue of the INFORMS journal Management Science.

Whether you call it the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, the law enacted in 2010 has generated strong debate about healthcare in America and the need to balance volume (healthcare providers billing by the number of services provided) with value (a results-based approach tying payment to better health). In this podcast, Atanu Basu, the founder and CEO of analytics software company Ayata, discusses an article on the special role of analytics in healthcare that he co-wrote with Pete Horner in the current, special

A physician may not have more than 15 minutes to discuss your most pressing health issues. So what do you do when you get home and need to make serious choices? Stanford University Professor Stefanos Zenios, the new Editor-in-Chief of the INFORMS journal Operations Research, took a leave of absence to develop a website devoted to patients with kidney disease and other ailments. Listen to him and Dr. Constantia Petrou as they discuss www.konnectology.com, the decision-making website they created for patients with funding from the National Institutes of Health.

What do quantum theory, Schopenhauer, Goethe, and Spinoza have to teach us about the economic disaster of 2007-8? Quite a bit, maintains Emanuel Derman of Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. Hear him discuss his new book, Models Behaving Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life.

Foreclosures have devastated neighborhoods, and not just those in inner cities. How can a community development corporation compete with private realtors to acquire a core of foreclosed properties and rehabilitate them in an effort to save a neighborhood? Michael P. Johnson of the University of Massachusetts Boston, author of Community-Based Operations Research and Chair of the INFORMS Section INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service, and Needs, explains how math modelers help small groups with limited resources do a lot of good.

Professor Laura McLay of Virginia Commonwealth University is a trend setter with her blog Punk Rock Operations Research. Hear her talk about the importance of social media; applying O.R. to healthcare topics like emergency care in extreme weather; why the Chicago Bears are the best football team ever; and her roles as an operations researcher, woman, and mother.

In the post-Osama bin Laden age, the U.S. and nations around the world still face the danger of terrorism in many forms. One threat is terrorists smuggling nuclear material through ports and across borders to assemble a nuclear weapon for a domestic attack. At the 2011 INFORMS annual meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina in November, Prof. Gaukler and colleagues present a paper on O.R. methods used to fight this threat. Prof. Gaukler previews his research in this podcast.

What can discoveries about the human brain teach forecasters, computer scientists, and corporate executives? And why is hockey legend Wayne Gretsky the perfect example of these teachings? Former USA Today reporter Kevin Maney, who wrote a popular article about algorithms in the 1990s, discusses The Two-Second-Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future—Just Enough, the new title he wrote with Vivek Ranadivé.

As columnist Vijay Mehrotra explains in the current issue of Analytics Magazine, something has been going right in the city of Raleigh since 2006. Yet if analytics is a household word today, it wasn't five years ago. Michael Rappa, Director of the Institute for Analytics at North Carolina State University, tells how his program began a trend and how it now places 90% of its graduates as the field of analytics flourishes

Picture yourself staring at the screen as your brand X online search for a flight goes on and on. Now look at a travel service like Kayak that explains how the system is checking one airline and one flight after another. Where would you rather search? Would you even be willing to wait slightly longer if you felt you had a window into what was going on as you waited? In the Sepember issue of Management Science, doctoral student Ryan W. Buell and Assoc. Prof. Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School explore the tradeoffs of the way you wait on the Internet. No reason to wait – hear them explain their research in this week's podcast.

Our emergency rooms have become an alarming example of the physical dangers that can arise from congestion. In an article in the current issue of ORMS Today, Doug Samuelson of InfoLogix, together with emergency care physician Dr. David Eitel of the Wellspan Health System, examines the problems in today's ER's and the creative ways that operations researchers are offering solutions. Hear Doug, who last podcast on the American election system, provide his overview.