SPSS and the importance of analytics

It's time to find out who your customers are

You may know the lyrics to this Beatles classic:
“I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade…”

Jack Noonan, President and CEO of SPSS Inc., has just done that, as IBM announced its plans to purchase this leading provider of social science statistical analysis. And if you don’t yet understand how important that is, it’s time you found out.

Statistical Package for Social Science — SPSS — was released in its first version in 1968 after being developed by Norman H. Nie and C. Hadlai Hull. Norman Nie was then a political science postgraduate at Stanford University, and now Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Chicago. SPSS is among the most widely used programs for statistical analysis in social science. It is used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government, education researchers, marketing organizations and others. The original SPSS manual (Nie, Bent & Hull, 1970) has been described as “Sociology’s most influential book”. In addition to statistical analysis, data management (case selection, file reshaping, creating derived data) and data documentation (a metadata dictionary is stored in the the datafile) are features of the base software.

In doing my time at The University of Surrey (UK), in economics, sociology and statistics, this was one of the programs to learn. I love SPPS. One could use all measure of correlations to test causality. Upon entering the workforce I was amazed by the number of companies that invested heavily in advertising, marketing and promotional campaigns… yet never piloted a project or ran the data against an SPSS model. These were organizations that spent millions of dollars, yet always seemed to chase business — being reactive instead of strategic. Business was generated by default, not by design.

Analytics Everywhere
When you integrate analytics into key business processes, then the right decisions are made and the best actions are taken on a consistent, repeatable basis.

Sustainable Innovation
How do you differentiate from your competitors? It’s a simple formula – Intellectual Property + Sustainable Innovation; and customer intimacy can drive them both.

The primary goal of predictive analytics—and the predictive enterprise—is to improve results. When you know what to expect, you can respond proactively. In order to change outcomes, you must act on this new-found customer knowledge.

This is a new era for SPSS/IBM. I will be watching with great interest…

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Tags: analytics, customers, IBM, SPSS