On January 19th, Ironside hosted a webinar on exploring the Top 3 User Enhancements in Cognos Analytics. Scott Misage, Ironside Engagement Manager and Bob O’Donnell, IBM Senior Technical Solutions Architect, delivered an overview and a Cognos Analytics demo. Read more
Suppose you’re trying to build a model to predict respondents, and in your data set, about 3% of the population will respond (target = 1). Without applying any specific analysis techniques, your prediction results will likely be that every record is predicted as a non responder (predicted target = 0), making the prediction result insufficiently informative. This is due to the nature of this kind of information, which we call highly imbalanced data. Read more
Even though we’re already blazing full speed ahead into 2016, it’s always important to take a minute to look back at the past year and recognize the high points that made it special. In addition to being named a Boston Business Journal Pacesetter for the second time, making the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for the third time, and receiving IBM’s 2015 Business Intelligence Partner of the Year award, we’ve produced several valuable and popular pieces of thought leadership to enrich the analytics community. Here are the top 5 articles 2015 saw us release. We hope you find them useful as you start your journey into the new year. Read more
Do you ever wonder how Netflix makes recommendations for you? Or how the drug store decides which coupons to offer you when you make a purchase? Behind the scenes they have a data scientist conducting what is called market basket analysis, which searches through vast amounts of purchase history information to find patterns in people’s purchases, web searches, or Netflix viewing preferences. The data mining technique used for market basket analysis is called Association Rules (AR). This is the actual algorithm designed to detect probabilistic if- then statements, such as “If you watched Breaking Bad and House of Cards, then you are also likely to enjoy Mad Men.” Read more
By now we all know that Hadoop is a central part of many big data projects, but how do we integrate this technology with some of the more traditional approaches to data handling? Is there a way to make sure our Hadoop cluster is interacting with and enriching the rest of our analytics environment? Luckily, there’s a whole suite of utilities that interact with Hadoop to address these questions, and it’s important to know what they are and how to take advantage of them. In this article, we’re going to take a quick look at five commonly used utilities in the Hadoop Ecosystem to help you understand how they can be used to integrate the Hadoop framework with more traditional relational databases and leverage the data for analytical purposes. Read more
Continuing from where we left off in the last article, I wanted to go more in-depth on which incentive compensation management (ICM) reports you should start with as you begin moving toward a full-scale sales performance management (SPM) strategy. In my experience, ICM implementations include at minimum both a compensation statement containing high-level compensation information and a detail statement, also called an Individual Performance Report. Although the quality can vary, these two reports cover the immediate needs of an ICM system in which the primary goal is to calculate and pay variable compensation. Read more
The deep BI knowledge of Ironside’s Education Services department was showcased this year at IBM Insight 2015. Wayne Estrada, one of our most experienced Senior Technical Instructors, delivered an in-depth session on a topic that is often a chief concern for many IBM Cognos environments: report security. Using advanced techniques in Report Studio, Wayne showed participants how to create customized security protocols that exactly meet their environment’s security needs and fine-tune report responses based on security requirements. Read more
This year at IBM Insight 2015, Ironside had the unique opportunity to tell one of our most compelling recent customer stories: how Manchester PD used Ironside’s IronShield predictive policing platform to implement some highly effective crime reduction strategies. Greg Bonnette, our VP of Strategy & Innovation, delivered the presentation on behalf of Manchester PD, who IBM had selected as a presenter, and highlighted the components of IronShield and the results that Manchester PD is getting out of it. Read more
Are your reports an asset or a liability? It’s an important question, but it’s one that many compensation administrators typically see as secondary as they put on and take off the many hats they wear on a daily basis. It’s time we started reevaluating that assumption. Of course, the number one priority with incentive compensation management (ICM) is paying commissions correctly and on time, but a strong reporting strategy tied to that process can make a huge difference in terms of building employee trust and increasing productivity. Read more
Selling financial services effectively requires a highly motivated, deeply knowledgeable team that can keep up with all the shifting recommendations, regulations, and investment options endemic to the industry. In this kind of a chaotic atmosphere where priorities change by the minute, it’s crucial to know with certainty that your sales organization is not only taking action to secure new customers but is also targeting that action and optimizing it to have the largest impact possible. One of the top mutual fund and financial services groups in the world engaged with Ironside to put this kind of transparency in place and establish strong sales performance management (SPM) strategies that would drive effective actions from the executive level down to the individual field reps. Read more
Ironside is a data, analytics, and AI consulting and technology implementation company. We work with clients to understand their business objectives and day-to-day challenges, then employ our deep expertise in data strategy, architecture and engineering, integration, business intelligence, AI, and generative AI. We create technical solutions and practical approaches designed to drive smarter, data-driven decisions across a company and help it move further and faster toward its business goals.