Crunching True

A common question that is in a lot of minds today is how can someone obtain an advantage doing  data analyses, you can call this data mining or in other way, maybe in a deeper one, just like Ian Ayres says becoming a super crunchers. Once I´m intent to reveal things that aren´t so public yet  my first post will be about this question, who knows with some answers.

That are many examples of companies that uses information to achieve market advantage and in some cases a unique kind of service to grow its market share. I can mention companies that are already doing this like Amazon does with the session "Frequently Bought Together" or even "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" or companies that has the potential of doing this like Google (you can see more examples in Super Crunchers).

Today I won´t discuss about the beliefs and faiths in this subject (that are a lot of pros and cons) but I will talk about how to start doing this, massive data analyses in your bussiness. The first thing is: It´s not something that you can do overnight. Selecting data digging trough hidden truths is something that you must first design what you planning to discover with this, all the companies that have successfull implementing this didn´t start its business with this subject in mind, they had its main business, its products, its services and saw an opportunity of start analysing all the data they captured during the time.

Once you already have you established business it is easier to start, and as a second advice you should always think in how can you get more data during the lifecycle of your product/service, never is enough when you think of data, get as much as you can. It is also important to identifiy any gaps that you have to fulfill your statiscal models, the data and truths around it are always changing so you must change too.

My final suggestion here is to give some steps backward and try the see the whole scene, try to imagine what data or information usefull are missing, what services you can build to aggregate more data, qualify them, something like a master data management and don´t get yourself frustrate, first look can be deceiving and nothing is so hard that you can´t give it a try, just like I am doing right now.

As you can wonder this subject is far from finish, but that is all for today folks!