Metaphorically, belief and disbelief in business analytics as a competitive edge, and not just a passing fad, meet at a door. On one side is passion, and on the other, fear. Passion always lives with fear. Those with passion for a methodology, like embracing analytics to support decision, have fear that others will reject them and their ideas. What position for analytics will come out ahead? Opposition or proposition?

Technology is no longer the barrier to analytics

What is it about accepting a new idea like applying analytics? There is a lot. And it mainly has to do with the natural resistance to change with people. People like the status quo. The main barrier to the acceptance of applying analytics is no longer technical but rather is behavioral and cultural. The software tools are proven. The use of analytics by casual users, not just a team of trained statisticians, has become widespread. more

Until several years ago, all 175,000 or so corporate and pass-through tax returns received by the Kentucky Department of Revenue (DOR) each year were processed manually. As a result, reviews of the returns could lag by several years, says Sherman Nave, director of the division of corporation tax. What’s more, the department was able to capture only a small amount of information, and only from C-corporations; the information contained in returns of pass-through entities, such as partnerships and S-corporations, generally didn’t get reviewed.

That’s because given the massive amount of paper making its way through the office, reviewers were compelled to “only pick the low-hanging fruit,” says Michael Smith, senior director of business development with SourceHOV LLC, a provider of business process services, including document management and knowledge processing systems. more

A few weeks ago I got snookered on the cyber-risk management front.

I read Washington Post article — a piece of reportage describing yet another disturbing cyber security breach — that my local paper had picked up. Only this particular article was far more disturbing than I expected: Russian hackers had caused a water pump in an Illinois utility to malfunction through a similar means that the Stunext worm employed to monkey-wrench (for a year or two, anyway) Iran’s nuclear capabilities. This type of “kinetic cyberattack” was the first ever on U.S. soil — at least the first ever to be reported. more

In early November, the House passed H.R. 1965, which had been introduced in May. The bill, sponsored by Rep. James Himes (D-CT), would amend the 1934 Securities Act so that companies would not need to register their issuance of equity securities to be traded on an exchange unless they have at least $10 million in assets. Under current law, the threshold is $1 million for some issuers. In addition, the threshold for registration would begin with 2,000 shareholders if the issuer is a bank or bank holding company, and 500 if it is neither, according to the summary presented on GovTrack.us.

“This bill helps banks help growing businesses access the capital they need to expand and create jobs while maintaining important protections for investors,” Rep. Himes said in a statement. more

I’m seeing far too many instances of the phrase “corporate bounty hunter” used in conjunction with the whistleblower provisions of Dodd-Frank.

The phrase suggests that the law’s purpose is to provide incentives to shady characters to falsely claim that their companies are misbehaving in order to collect hefty payouts for blowing the whistle.

Come on. more