I was quoted a fair bit in this FISCAL TIMES article – check it out:

The Big Data Advantage: Can Republicans Catch Up?

 

The Republicans are now talking in earnest about the virtues of Big Data – because they have to.

 

Ever since Mitt Romney lost the November presidential election, Republicans as disparate as former GOP presidential candidate and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and House Majority Whip Eric Cantor are pressing the need to get behind Big Data. They know now what the GOP ignored in 2012 – Obama won in large part because his campaign used the skills of over 50 data analysts in the tech space to micro-target key segments of the electorate. They know it’s critical not just to appeal to broader swaths of the American public, but to go out and win elections.

 

RELATED:  The Real Story Behind Obama's Election Victory

 

“Data science Obama-style has no relationship to the Republican model of Internet politics,” Gingrich wrote recently in a plaintive memo designed to push the GOP off its rump ahead of CPAC – the conservative gathering next week. “The Obama system is helped in data science by its 85-to-90 percent dominance of Silicon Valley. If you have the founders of Google and Facebook helping you design your system, you have an enormous advantage over your competitors.”

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This is hardly limited to political organizations. Eric Siegel, author of the new book Predictive Analytics and founder of Predictive Analytics World, a gathering of predictive data experts, says that by leveraging the data they collect, “organizations attain a position of power: They learn from the data how to predict human behavior.”

 

A company with hundreds of thousands of customer records, for example, “can learn from the experience encoded in this data. It’s a kind of pattern-detection that can help them discover which combinations of factors about a customer makes the individual much more likely than average to cancel.”  

 

These factors aren’t always obvious or intuitive, Siegel told The Fiscal Times. “They are signals that reveal odds, even if a customer has not yet begun to formulate any particular plan of action.”

 

Continued… Read the full article here