Ch01
IT at Work 1.1
Watson Wins Jeopardy, Leaving Human Champions in Its Silicon Dust
Questions
1. Explain how Watson figured out the most likely response to win the tournament.
Watson parsed the question down into keywords and sentence fragments in order to find statistically related phrases. Watson was able to quickly execute thousands of language analysis algorithms simultaneously to compile potential answers and determine the level of confidence associated with each one.
2. View the IBM demo, “Turning insight into outcomes,” at http://ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/business_analytics/article/outperform_with_smarter_analytics.html.
3. Discuss how companies in various industries are using the insights from analytics to achieve significant outcomes in customer satisfaction and retention, operational efficiency, financial processes, and/or risk, fraud, and compliance management.
Data analytics can help institutions develop practices for attracting new clients, creating new products and finding new opportunities. They can use data analytics to improve customer loyalty and retention by increasing customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction can be increased by understanding the customers better. A single view of the customer can be formed by integrating data from multiple customer databases containing customer profiles and histories. Through an enhanced understanding of their customers, companies can find out what is and is not important to their customers as well as provide them with a more personalized experience and respond to their unique needs. Customer service representatives are able to respond more appropriately to the needs of customers.
Predictive analytics can be used to identify customer groups and their purchase behaviors. Marketing campaigns can be directed to those specific groups and opportunities for cross-selling products can be found. Marketing activities can be linked to results to see how well the campaigns are working. Managers are better able to
Watson Wins Jeopardy, Leaving Human Champions in Its Silicon Dust
Questions
1. Explain how Watson figured out the most likely response to win the tournament.
Watson parsed the question down into keywords and sentence fragments in order to find statistically related phrases. Watson was able to quickly execute thousands of language analysis algorithms simultaneously to compile potential answers and determine the level of confidence associated with each one.
2. View the IBM demo, “Turning insight into outcomes,” at http://ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/business_analytics/article/outperform_with_smarter_analytics.html.
3. Discuss how companies in various industries are using the insights from analytics to achieve significant outcomes in customer satisfaction and retention, operational efficiency, financial processes, and/or risk, fraud, and compliance management.
Data analytics can help institutions develop practices for attracting new clients, creating new products and finding new opportunities. They can use data analytics to improve customer loyalty and retention by increasing customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction can be increased by understanding the customers better. A single view of the customer can be formed by integrating data from multiple customer databases containing customer profiles and histories. Through an enhanced understanding of their customers, companies can find out what is and is not important to their customers as well as provide them with a more personalized experience and respond to their unique needs. Customer service representatives are able to respond more appropriately to the needs of customers.
Predictive analytics can be used to identify customer groups and their purchase behaviors. Marketing campaigns can be directed to those specific groups and opportunities for cross-selling products can be found. Marketing activities can be linked to results to see how well the campaigns are working. Managers are better able to