Every step you take

Analytics in sport has taken a giant leap, with advanced statistics, sophisticated video analysis and player tracking at the forefront.

On the eve of the 2012 UEFA Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, Petr Cech, the Chelsea goalkeeper, was given a two-hour DVD of every penalty kick that Bayern had taken since 2007. It was enough to calculate the probability of which way the ball would be placed when a penalty was taken. Chelsea went on to win the match following a penalty shoot-out and thereafter Cech said, “Six penalties the right way and I saved three, so basically the homework was very good.”

This March, at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, Michael Niemeyer, Bayern’s head of match analysis, said of Pep Guardiola, the famed former manager of Barcelona and the current Bayern boss, “As he came to Bayern, the first thing he said was: ‘The match analysis department is the most important department for me.’ The second thing was: ‘I see a big part of my work in the auditorium.’ The auditorium is the place where he has video sessions.”

Read the article published in The Hindu dt. 5th Jul 2015

A Strategist’s Guide to the Internet of Things

The digital interconnection of billions of devices is today’s most dynamic business opportunity.

Post by Frank Burkitt

Humanity has arrived at a critical threshold in the evolution of computing. By 2020, an estimated 50 billion devices around the globe will be connected to the Internet. Perhaps a third of them will be computers, smartphones, tablets, and TVs. The remaining two-thirds will be other kinds of “things”: sensors, actuators, and newly invented intelligent devices that monitor, control, analyze, and optimize our world.

This seemingly sudden trend has been decades in the making, but is just now hitting a tipping point. The arrival of the “Internet of Things” (IoT) represents a transformative shift for the economy, similar to the introduction of the PC itself. It incorporates other major technology industry trends such as cloud computing, data analytics, and mobile communications, but goes beyond them. Unlike earlier efforts to track and control large systems, such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), the Internet connection gives this shift almost limitless versatility. The IoT also opens a range of new business opportunities for a variety of players. These opportunities tend to fall into three broad strategic categories, each reflecting a different type of enterprise:

“Enablers” that develop and implement the underlying technology

“Engagers” that design, create, integrate, and deliver IoT services to customers

“Enhancers” that devise their own value-added services, on top of the services provided by Engagers, that are unique to the Internet of Things

How will your company build value in this new world? That will depend on the type of business you have today, the capabilities you can develop for tomorrow, and, most of all, your ability to understand the meaning of this new technology.

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Dashboards: Data Visualization for all Elements of the Business

It is time to stop thinking of dashboards as a “nice to have” and instead view the technology as a way to provide everyone in the company with a common version of the truth. Long-gone are the clunky spreadsheets and simple, static graphs; data visualization has evolved into a dynamic discipline that is opening up new doors for the exploration and analysis of complex data sets for a wide range of businesses.

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Forty (information management technology) Vendors We’re Watching: 2012

For a third year we (http://www.information-management.com) bring you our list of up and coming vendors on our radar that are doing their part to shape the groundswell in information management technology in the 21st Century.

View the complete list

Big Data for the Masses

Big data represents the significant shift in the way that companies receive and used data to fuel business. As the volume, velocity and variety of data increases, we must ready ourselves for managing it with big data strategies.

Download this white paper to read more about the current state of big data and what we can anticipate as it begins to gain mass appeal.

Are you ready for the era of ‘big data’?

Radical customization, constant experimentation, and novel business models will be new hallmarks of competition as companies capture and analyze huge volumes of data. Here’s what you should know.

Over time, we believe big data may well become a new type of corporate asset that will cut across business units and function much as a powerful brand does, representing a key basis for competition. If that’s right, companies need to start thinking in earnest about whether they are organized to exploit big data’s potential and to manage the threats it can pose. Success will demand not only new skills but also new perspectives on how the era of big data could evolve—the widening circle of management practices it may affect and the foundation it represents for new, potentially disruptive business models.

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