Tag Archives: Erik Brynjolfsson

Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs?

Robots and algorithms are getting good at jobs like building cars, writing articles, translating — jobs that once required a human. So what will we humans do for work? Andrew McAfee walks through recent labor data to say: We ain’t seen nothing yet. But then he steps back to look at big history, and comes up with a surprising and even thrilling view of what comes next. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)

Andrew McAfee is Associate Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of  “Race Against the Machine”

Erik Brynjolfsson on Big Data: A revolution in decision-making improves productivity

MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson

There is a fundamental change underway in the way that companies make decisions. Instead of relying on a leader’s gut instincts, an increasing number of companies are embracing a new method that involves data-based analytics. This ‘Big Data’ revolution is occurring mainly because technology enables firms to gather extremely detailed information from and propagate knowledge to their consumers, suppliers, alliance partners, and competitors.

Companies that use this type of ‘data driven decision making’ actually show higher performance. Working with Lorin Hitt and Heekyung Kim, I analyzed 179 large publicly-traded firms and found that the ones that adopted this method are about 5% more productive and profitable than their competitors.  Furthermore, the study found a relationship between this method and other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit for companies that are able to use Big Data to their advantage. Read More »

From Data to Decisions: Lessons from Davos, 2012

We are at the beginning of the Big Data era, and there is widespread anticipation that this will be a huge benefit to companies. I’ve been attending the World Economic Forum in Davos and in my `Data to Decisions’ panel we heard CEOs tell how Big Data can reinvent everything from CRM to internal processes to product design.

We also heard that there are significant challenges in data sourcing, permission agreements, data quality and of course privacy concerns, as most Big Data is personal data about customers. Fortunately these challenges can be addressed by conventional business practices.

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Big data drives security, risk discussion at MIT CIO affair

From Enterprise CIO Forum

I’ve  sat through the first two two sessions at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, expecting to hear all about the wonderful opportunities doing digital business.

Was I wrong!  The sessions, entitled 1) “Opportunities in the Digital Business World” and 2) “What every CIO should Know about the Future impact of Digital Business,”  focused on security, risk, privacy and how to manage infinite oceans of data were the dominant topic. We heard words like “headaches” and “hacker.”

Certainly, no one has corned the market for a playbook that explains how CIOs deal with vast amounts of data, all that threatens it and how to exploit it.

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Riding the Rising Information Wave–Are you swamped or swimming? MIT hosts experts

MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson

This week, two conferences on related topics are scheduled for successive days at MIT—the annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium today and the annual meeting of the MIT Center for Digital Business Thursday. Attendees at both events will include executives responsible for their organizations’ information services.

These leaders have very important jobs these days. Information management is no longer an obscure, technical department in companies. The success of firms can well hinge on how information managers do their jobs.

Every 1.2 years, the volume of business data worldwide doubles. In the course of the two days that the conferences are being held—actually any two days this year—businesses around the world will produce more data than all of the world’s businesses produced in all of history before 2003.

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