In a previous 3-part series, we discussed the main hurdles limiting the value that businesses get from data. In particular, we highlighted the importance of the timing of investment into establishing data infrastructure, recruiting data professionals, etc. The reasons are clear. Any significant returns on investment that you make on…

There has been a lot of talk in the recent years about the use of AI capabilities or machine-learned solutions to improve digital products or services and user experience. If we can cut through the hype and have the necessary building blocks in place as covered in Four Hurdles To…

Note: This article was written and originally published in October 2016. I have reviewed and refreshed the content to reflect changes with the tools used in this article in 2020. The source code and data used and mentioned in this article are available from https://github.com/wyswilson/jobsearch-engine Good search is about ensuring…

In the first and second part of this 3-part article, we covered the importance of knowledge about the different types of data and the roles that they play in data solutions. Equally as important is ensuring that your business invests in the people who have such knowledge and know what…

This is the second part of a 3-part article on the four hurdles to creating value from data. In the first part, we gave an overview of the four hurdles. We posited that the main challenges in extracting value from investments into all things data boil down to who (and…

Data provide organisations the new platform in the 21st century and beyond for innovation of products and processes — there is no arguing that. From identifying bottlenecks in departmental processes and reasons behind marketing campaigns under performing, to using data to inform and improve products and services in ways that…

A previous post on retrieval, precision and recall discussed the distinction between the three important concepts in search. In another post, we described the two main approaches for retrieval, and saw that, for faceted search, retrieval with high precision is the foundation for a good search experience. In other words…

We have spoken about the fact that relevance is subjective. However, this does not mean that lines need not be drawn. In the area of search, there are generally two approaches of bringing results back given a user query. The first one, which partitions the entire collection into relevant versus…

We make decisions on a daily basis, from something as innocent as figuring out what to have for lunch to deciding on whether to go for that last bid or not in a property auction. …