Be prepared!  As obvious as it might seem, it remains a very common mistake for candidates to not adequately prepare for an interview.  Here are some of the most important things you should know and do:

• Know what the company does.  Where they are in the marketplace? Look for press releases to refer to in the interview.  Knowing a lot about the company will “always” impress your interviewer.
• Know what position the person interviewing you holds.   Are they the manager for the position, the HR Manager, a recruiter?
• Have a job description and be prepared to correlate your experience to the job description of the position.  Ask questions about the position outside of what is in the job description.  What is the work environment, will you work with a team or as an individual?

If you do your homework it will dramatically increase your chances for success!  Don't forget to close out your interview by letting the interviewer know you want the job!  Ask for it !  Simply say something such as:  “I believe that I am an excellent fit for this position; when can I start?”

A growing number of companies are setting up predictive analytics programs and investing in predictive modeling tools. But fully understanding the nuances of the discipline and honing internal processes for building effective predictive models can be elusive goals. The great promise is learning things from your data that you may not have thought of before.  But also remember that the data is all that the modeling program sees of the world. If the data has a hidden bias or constraint, the machine will think that everything does. A great example is an artificial intelligence program that chugged overnight on a database being entered from the Encyclopedia Britannica. It was looking for any hidden links or patterns that weren’t obvious from this great summary of common-sense or background knowledge. The result was, essentially, “Hey, everyone born before 1900 was famous!”
 

The edge for small and mid-size businesses in 2012 is the seamless utilization of the mobile space. In a recent article posted in Crain's Chicago Business, Robert Wile (12/12) highlights a key message: "Having an effective website is no longer good enough. Customers expect to be able to use your online products and services on a mobile phone or an iPad as easily as they can on their desktop computers."    Making your products available and easily accessible to customers on a mobile platform should be a part of your marketing and IT analysis.  Trillium provides and outstanding strategic and delivery management capabilities to help provide this edge.

The ocean of data to be analyzed is getting deeper and wider.  The New York Times recently published an article on the data deluge in DNA sequencing.  They reported that the world's largest genomics research institute, BGI, generates so much data that it can't send it to clients over the Internet anymore, as that would take weeks. So they send computer disks containing the data, via FedEx!   The article highlights that data handling is now a key constraint for their industry.  Data quickly becomes dated or runs into an overwrite issue so making sense of data "quickly" is paramount.  It’s hard to believe but according to the NY Times article, "It costs more to analyze a genome than to sequence a genome."  It's not at all clear what you do with all that data.  Every industry is heading towards this problem.

So, what’s the solution?  In addition to large scale distributed storage system, there needs to be concerted effort towards disciplined approach to analytics. The typical used "Christopher Columbus" mentality of sailing into data and hoping to find insights isn't going to work anymore. Suppose you are given a task of finding sunken treasures from the Pacific Ocean.  The Pacific is deep and huge--how would you approach finding the lost treasure/gold.  Would you rent a submarine and start cruising the ocean like an explorer might?  Or would you look for clues to where the gold could be and use that as guide to direct your attention and effort like a detective would?

If you go the explorer route, you are guaranteed the views: nice corals, beautiful wildlife, emerald-green waters, but the chances of you finding any sunken treasure is slim. Essentially you are not directing your effort of finding treasure, just “something”. Your actions of exploration are independent of what you are looking for, you could have been tasked with looking for killer whales and you would still take the same action.

If on the other hand, you choose to be a detective, looking at historical ship routes and ship wrecks, using depth as a way to eliminate, you can start identifying potential areas to explore. Once you have identified a dozen plus potential location, you can prioritize the top 3 areas and then use submarine or deep sea diver to go explore. You are more likely find gold and in much shorter time. You will either succeed fast or you will fail faster and then re-strategize to attack the problem again.

Good analysts are detectives using business/corporate goals and priorities as guides to direct their effort to go looking for answers which are relevant to business and thereby finding gold nuggets and driving positive financial impact for the organization.