BIG DATA BASED METRICS ARE REPLACING TRADITIONAL MEASURES

The landscape for gathering information around public health and public opinion has seen some dramatic changes.  Some of them are obvious, that Twitter reflects in real time virtually any event that is happening, for example.  Some are less so because they involved an evolution from old to new.   An example of the latter can be …

SOCIAL MEDIA SENTIMENT MEASURED IN REAL-TIME

The trend watcher, Dan Burris, can usually be counted on for an observation that will cause a number of seemingly unrelated data points that have floated amorphously on your radar to coalesce into something concrete.  Such was the case recently when he pointed out that “Social Analytics will increasingly be used by marketers and researchers …

ONC’S HEALTHCARE IT VISION: ON COURSE OR ALONG FOR THE RIDE?

Last June the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a report called “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure.”  Its vision for the future is of an “interoperable health IT ecosystem [that] makes the right data available to the right …

DELIVERING ON THE PROMISE OF BIG DATA

In his book Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread, Alex Pentland, sets his sights on, among other things, “entire cities” as targets for solutions based on Big Data. Pentland defines Social Physics this way: “social physics seeks to understand how the flow of ideas and information translates into changes in behavior.” The author cites an …

DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION GETS A CRITICAL LOOK

Among the advice I recently gave to a client as input to an innovation offsite was what seemed to me the almost too obvious: think in terms of sustaining versus disruptive innovation as advised by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma.  This concept has become de rigueur for any firm interested in competing through innovation.  …