After many years spent working with businesses of various sizes, we’ve begun to notice patterns around the successful use of data and analytics. Many businesses tell us they want to be “data-driven” or use analytics to achieve their goals. One aspect that is often overlooked when it comes to using analytics is the role of team culture, or business culture, in actually making use of the insights generated by analytics.

All of the effort that goes into…

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Visualization is crucial to understanding and learning from our data. As we continue to experiment with new forms of visualization, we wanted to share with you a heatmap of consumer sentiment over 13 years, from 2000 to the end of 2013. The visualization below shows a grim, yet informative, view of how consumers feel about their lives and prospects. See the visualization here.

“I’ve invested in analytics and have thousands of data points streaming into our databases, yet life doesn’t seem any easier.” Unfortunately, this is a very common complaint about Big Data investments. Teams get overwhelmed with too much data, and analysis often takes longer if you throw more data at a problem. A newly emerging trend in this space is the use of “prescriptive analytics” — rather than simply collecting data, your team can rely on automated analysis tools to generate…