INFORMS Today: The Podcast Series

What does the year 2015 hold for those of us in this exciting tech field?

What do new techniques of capturing your personal data mean to your privacy?

How should a business leader interested in Big Data – whether a newcomer or a professional with analytics experience – develop and implement a major Big Data initiative?

Predicting mass killings and genocide so that international bodies can intervene and prevent disaster.

When former INFORMS President Brenda Dietrich and two colleagues contemplated ways to explain the myriad possibilities for organizations to use analytics, they decided to exemplify their ideas by opening the IBM vault and sharing highlights of how they had used analytics internally to solve difficult business problems.

High employee turnover is bad for business. Predictive analytics can help you hire employees most likely to remain with your organization and flag veteran employees who may depart. The benefit goes straight to return on investment. Hear Talent Analytics’ Greta Roberts on why analytics is becoming an important part of human resources and contributing to the bottom line.

What happens when that slightly used holiday gift is fraudulently returned?

Heineken is a popular beer in the U.S. and across the world not only because of its qualities as a beer but also because of the marketing acumen used to bring it to the public.

When Innovative Decisions, Inc. (IDI) committed 11 of its analysts to go for INFORMS CAP (Certified Analytics Professional) certification, it set both a record and an example for other consulting groups and corporations to follow.

Showing young people how to avoid the disastrous choices that can ruin lives – and make the kinds of decisions that help them navigate this most difficult period in a person’s life using ahoona.com, a social network that helps teens share their decision dilemmas and solutions with their peers.

HR departments routinely collect information about their employees. But what happens when they use predictive analytics to predict if someone might leave the company – and that someone is you?

A heated political controversy in the U.S. surrounds the amount of regulation that government should apply to private industry. A corollary to the issue is a question: can't we all get by with self-regulation? A study in the Oct issue of Management Science draws strong conclusions from experiments conducted by three researchers. Find out what the investigators would recommend to the U.S. Congress.

In a new study, Analytics Skills, Tools, and Attitudes 2013: Analytics capabilities needed now and in the future, Lavastorm Analytics takes a deep look into the way that organizations are employing analytics, what skills gap remains, and what departments are using analytics talent.

Do you want to hire a single analytics professional – or start an analytics department? Using analytics to identify analytics professionals, the HR consultants Talent Analytics have identified the key characteristics of successful analytics professionals.

Sometimes our perceived virTue are really our faults. Kicking bad work habits that masquerade as virTue is the theme of Tipping Sacred Cows by Duke Corporate Education's Jake Breeden. Breeden touched on his suggestions for analytics and O.R. professionals in a videotaped session during the 2013 INFORMS Analytics Conference. He offers more insights into how to improve your soft skills in this interview.

Doing the calculations is one part of your job as an analytics professional. Communicating your results to colleagues and those outside your field is another, and it can be difficult using words and diagrams to make your most important results understandable to others. In this podcast, Evan Levine, the author of Fundamental Principles of Analytic Communication, which appears in Analytics Magazine, and the new Applying-Analytics: A Practical Introduction, discusses four principles of communicating analytics, and how you can achieve them. Make sure you master them.

Sometimes academics publish and wonder if anyone out there is reading. In the case of Eric Bickel of the University of Texas, he found that one person was. Early in his career Bickel did research on sports analytics/O.R., specifically strategies for baseball players at the plate and their managers. He asked, when should a batter take a pitch? In 2009 he published a related paper in Decision Analysis. Afterward, he received a thank you from a minor league catcher who had begun following his advice. It turns out that that player was Evan_Gattis, now the hot rookie with the Atlanta Braves, and when Sports Illustrated covered Gattis' remarkable first year, it wrote about Bickel's influence on Gattis' hitting. Learn more about this remarkable experience in this new podcast.

Big Data provides big challenges, even for experts in advanced analytics and operations research. In this segment recorded at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research that took place in San Antonio this spring, Brian Keller of Booz Allen Hamilton jumped in with a talk entitled, “Getting Started with Big Data Analytics.” Listen to him as he examines systems, software, and the many ingredients that you can use to implement Big Data solutions.

Like it or not, the Affordable Care Act – dubbed Obamacare by detractors and supporters alike – will become the law of the land in the United States in less than a year. How are hospitals beginning to cope with important data management requirements? How are healthcare analytics professionals guiding hospital administrators as they prepare for a brave new future? Listen to former INFORMS President President Don Kleinmuntz of Strata Decision Technology explore the growing role of analytics and hospital management in this broad-ranging interview recorded at the 2013 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics.

One of the challenges for an expert in any specialized field is explaining highly technical information to internal and external clients. This has been a longstanding problem for consultants in analytics and operations research who work with business people who can’t understand the field’s highly mathematical framework. At the 2013 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research Carrie Beam of Carrie Beam Consulting. gave a workshop with solid advice for analytics consultants who need to find a common language with clients. Afterward, she sat down to record this useful podcast. Listen and learn.