SUMMARY Historically, whenever house prices in the US have risen at a rapid and excessive rate, they have subsequently tended to decline. Further, these house price declines have been accompanied by an economic recession, either at a regional or national level. At a state level, the historical data also shows that states with the biggest house price declines generally tend …

The White House executive order on responsible AI development and the OMB draft guidance on managing agency adoption establish requirements for the Federal use of Artificial Intelligence technology. As noted in the OMB draft guidance, in 2023, US federal agencies identified over 700 ways they use AI to advance their missions, and this number is only likely to grow as …

Introduction Navigating the intricate challenges of implementing a successful artificial intelligence (AI) strategy requires a comprehensive approach, where each interlocking strategic component plays a crucial role in overall success. Organizations need to coordinate all AI-relevant factors to ensure their AI strategy’s compatibility with long-term business objectives. This article presents the six most critical AI strategic factors, spanning data acquisition and …

Introduction Artificial Intelligence (AI) has garnered immense attention and investment in recent years, promising to revolutionize all aspects of business. However, indiscriminate application of AI to business problems, regardless of practicality, can introduce unnecessary solution complexity at higher than necessary costs. This article emphasizes that AI should be reserved only for select business cases when specific project factors are present. …

BACKGROUND There have been several articles about the role of a Chief Data Officer (CDO) of an enterprise. In this white paper, I discuss the role of a CDO in a business domain within the enterprise. By “business domain”, I am referring to a business area within an enterprise which could either be a line of business (LOB) having a …

BACKGROUND There have been various articles about enterprise data strategy. In this white paper, I discuss the data strategy for a business domain within the enterprise. By “business domain”, I refer to a business area within an enterprise which could either be a line of business (LOB) having a P&L or a shared service such as finance, HR, IT or …

In my article on Aug 5, I had said that we are likely to see a major decline in house prices leading to a large number of mortgage defaults. By now, house prices have started to drop with the Case-Shiller Index (CSI)  showing declines for three months now in various western metros. The national CSI and the purchase only FHFA …

Even though today’s jobs report has been much better than expected, overall the economy still shows signs of slipping into a recession and, further, the Fed remains on the path to increase interest rates very significantly. Consumption, the most important component of GDP, is starting to slow down with retail sales, adjusted for inflation, declining for a few months now. …

You Might Be Using Dark UX Patterns Users’ hire your website or app to do a job. Whether it’s to use a service, learn about a topic or to purchase something, the user has goals — and so do you. A well-designed experience makes it super simple and intuitive for the user to know where to look and what to click to …

What is Operations Research? Making decisions is easy, making good ones is hard. Arriving at the best decision with limited data and lots of uncertainty is even harder. Operations Research (OR) provides a framework for making better decisions when data is incomplete and uncertainty is high. Since we all face these challenges, all decision-makers should consider themselves as operations researchers, …

2020 could have been electronic health records’ moment. When COVID-19 hit the state of Washington and then New York City, a standardized and centralized database of aggregated patient data could have helped differentiate coronavirus symptoms from other conditions, hashed out high-risk patients and raised flags that a pandemic was imminent (and that this wasn’t just the seasonal flu). Integrated apps …

Productivity, optimization and efficiency were the name of the game for the past few decades.  Enterprises went all-in on business models, supply chains and IT infrastructures hyper-focused and lean as can be. Not a penny wasted, needless data stored nor a second lost. Redundancy became kind of a bad word. Then the world shut down. Businesses that had been solely …

Data solutions often require months for implementation: there’s technology to integrate, users to train and cultures to shift. But in the middle of the pandemic, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) didn’t have months. Every minute was a missed opportunity. When COVID-19 outbreaks began rapidly spreading across U.S. nursing …

Data has an expiration date. What it is depends on how that data is being used.  Consider a wildfire. Real-time data is essential here. Data about the fire, like location, expanse, terrain, temperature and speed, delivered a week after it’s been collected won’t help firefighters on the ground right now.  Yet if you analyzed it alongside datasets from previous weeks, …