Oz Analytics

Forget The Politics

I read with interest this morning about the kerfuffle New York Times blogger Nate Silver is causing. A Financial Times article (subscription required) explained that Silver has been using statistical analysis to consistently predict an Obama win in the coming US elections. His FiveThirtyEight blog is now being roundly criticised by the right-wing - and the criticism is getting pretty personal.

The unfortunate reality is that this "effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice” (Dean Chambers) has a pretty amazing track record of success. He started plying his trade forecasting the performance of Major League Baseball players and since 2008 has turned his attention to politics. In 2008 he correctly predicted the presidential winner of 49 out of 50 states. As a side note, the same blog (but different blogger) also correctly predicted the narrow win for the ruling Australian Labor party in 2010.

As far as I can see, Silver is only guilty of using open data to make systematic and scientifically based predictions using probability theory. You can check-out his methods for yourself.

I recommend his blog to anyone interested in stats and polling. TL;DR? If that's too old-school for you gen-Y twits (?), then he tweets as well.

His book 'The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't' has just been published and I'm ordering it today.

It's good to see that mathematically-based poll analysis continues to be politicised in the States. Way to go America - who needs facts?

Governance: Influence versus Action?

Information and Data Governance Forum

Sydney 14 - 15 December 2010

At short notice, I was invited to come along to this forum and was able to attend most sessions on the first day. I made space in my day because I was curious about the Information Governance community in Sydney.

My day-to-day role is in the broader field of Information Management. A subtle distinction to an outsider, but in practice I find there is a world of difference. Sceptical? I understand, but let me try to convince you. I'm sure that I will also offend people, but what the hell, life's too short to be agreeable all the time ...

Influence versus Action

The forum presentations and discussions highlighted the IG (Information Governance) emphasis on the big picture of corporate policies and the need to sell executive management on the idea of IG. My experience of IM (Information Management) is that there is a greater focus on directly delivering value to business users of information.

In summary, IG = influence while IM = action.

I can hear the howls of protest from my IG colleagues already. I stand by these words because my actions match them. To me, IM is only worth investing in when there is a direct pay-off for the business. Yes, I'm talking about demonstrable return on investment (ROI).

My IM responsibilities primarily manifest themselves as projects. Projects with a budget and timescale to deliver an agreed set of business benefits. These benefits are measured and used to determine whether-or-not the project is successful.

IG is also something I own and while it is vital to achieving greater IM value (ROI), it is an enabler. It drives indirectly a great deal of the value that a good IM project delivers.

I believe that this is important to remember when considering investments of time and money in IG. Here are a couple of measuring sticks that I find are useful when considering IG investments:

• Will the IG capabilities be used in existing or in-stream IM business activities? If they are not, then don't do it. Keep them in your back pocket for a time when the organisation is a more mature practitioner of IM.
• Do the new IM benefits that the IG capabilities make possible, exceed their cost? Or in other words, is the ROI sufficient to justify making this investment instead of another?

In my experience IG rarely meets these criteria, and so, if I'm really pushed to give someone practical advice, then it is that you can also simply consider the 'right' level of IG as being those IG activities that you can afford to do within your existing resources (people and technologies) while you are busy delivering on your IM initiatives.

Don't get me wrong. I value IG strategically, but I think that the connections you can make between IM and value are more persuasive to the wider business community. And that often means that I can fund IM but not IG - but I can use IM to implement improved IG. Governance by stealth, if you like.

The Information Governance Community

But what about today's Information and Data Governance Forum? Well, it was a surprise on a couple of fronts. Firstly, it was a very small group and I was expecting to see more people. Perhaps it is too late in the year and being in the middle of the festive lunch season put many people off. But at least those that turned up all seemed to be 'hard core' IG managers. So there was some real experiences to be learned from.

There was also a predominance of government organisations represented, followed by a number of large industrial companies. On reflection it was refreshingly free of financial and consulting people. I feel safe to say that, having now moved 'out' of finance and into media. 

You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.  George W. Bush

So a number of the presentations were made from a fresh perspective. There was a lot of talk about the legal implications of poor/missing IG, records management and retention of information. 75, 80 and 'unlimited' years of records being required in some cases. It makes my 5 - 10 year retention policies look easy.

It was also interesting to learn that metadata is discoverable under Australian law. Something I had not given thought to before.

Finally, there was some talk about classification of information. This is something I have marked down as being too difficult in my own organisation. For semi-structured and unstructured data I am pursuing a strategy of employing ever smarter search technology rather than trying to classify a small fraction of the vast amounts of information that a media conglomerate produces each day.

I guess you can say that I am still betting on technology delivering a result faster and cheaper than cultural change. Maybe I'm still a man with a hammer that sees everything as a nail.

It's what keeps me up at night.

I blame the users. If I could just replace them with a bit of software then all my problems would be solved. Now where did I leave that hammer?

The State of Analytics Across Asia

Further to my last blog, I have collected my facts and thoughts into a year-end overview of Asia in 2009. Here's a round-up of developments that I noted over the last 12 months. There were many more that you can access by using the CORTEX, but several key events are listed below.

What are common trends across the region?

• A V-shaped market recovery is predicted in the 2010 BI market.
• The leading tech companies have created analytic centres of excellence across Asia. If you engage a major vendor or consultancy then it is likely that you will be leveraging Indian or Chinese IP.
• Low-cost and innovative reporting and analytic solutions are winning worldwide accolades. Strong sales across the region will continue and price sensitive buyers in Western markets will begin to take notice.

Notable Events in 2009

January

Accenture India said it planned to hire 8,000 people by the end of 2009, which will take its total workforce in India to 50,000. “We believe that analytics is going to be an important trend that our customers are going to demand from us. We think India is going to be a great place for us. We have some core centres of excellence in the analytics space in the country,” said William D Green, chairman and CEO of the firm that employs 177,000 people globally.

April

SAP Opens Co-Innovation Lab in Bangalore. Joins existing labs in Palo Alto, California, and Tokyo, Japan. Work has concentrated on delivering workflow and mobility solutions.

May

Analytics tools are becoming more vital to outsourcers -especially quality monitoring and performance management products. Agent Performance Optimisation (APO) products have become vital as outsourcers strive to differentiate themselves competitively and cut costs for their clients.

June

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) launched a new business intelligence solution for hospitals and health care sector. The company today said in a press release that it has developed an out of the box dashboard that will simplify projects, cut cost and dramatically shorten time to value related services to both hospital administration and patients care.

Ramco Systems in India introduced a corebanking analytics solution aimed at addressing Business Intelligence (BI) needs of banks. The analytics solution packaged and delivered with HP s Neoview Appliance box will be based on Ramco s Decisionworks software framework. 

Chinese telecom operators reportedly spent US$1.18 bln on their business and operation support systems in 2008, up 26.8 percent year-on-year and a significant portion of this was reportedly on business intelligence.

China Mobile is working on a back end system based on cloud computing technology, which it has dubbed "Big Cloud". This includes data mining systems for China Mobile's mobile search service and a business intelligence system to track user behavior.

August

IBM Analytics Centre in Beijing. IBM announced last August that it would open an advanced business analytics centre in Beijing that will serve clients including the Chinese government. This centre joins a worldwide network of others in cities such as Berlin, Tokyo, London, New York and Washington, D.C. China was the first to be based in a developing country.

The company has stated that the China centre will at first focus on products aimed at traffic, water and electrical grid management.

"A major stimulus opportunity in China, transportation infrastructure such as new high speed trains, a hugely expanded rail network and faster links between the country's major cities are in development. This center will bring together research experts, major universities, partners and clients to develop best practices for rail systems that are smarter, more efficient, greener and attractive for travelers all around the globe."

They also said that other centres are planned in China.

Activities by the centre have included:

• Building a cloud computing platform in the city of Dongying (in the Yellow River Delta) as a model for how local government and businesses can modernize in China. Chinese economic stimulus funds are fueling the project, which is expected to be duplicated in other cities. The Yellow River Delta Cloud Computing Center will serve as a central platform for developing software that automates the petroleum production supply chain. It will be used to expand e-government services in Dongying and will serve as a technology center through which Chinese software engineers will supply outsourcing services. Clients for the first of three planned phases include Sanyo and Dupont. In the second phase the Dongying City Government will use cloud software to supply government services and administer "a smart airport, smart parks, and smart railroads.". A third phase would extend into the cities health care services.
• In September it was announced that IBM, the City of Shenyang, and China's Northeastern University were embarking on a major "smart city" collaboration effort focused on enabling Shenyang to improve the lives of its citizens by meeting its environmental responsibility goals.

"The Collaboratory will focus on advancing technology solutions that: significantly reduce carbon emissions, conserve energy, manage water efficiently, effectively track food from farm to fork, enhance the intelligence of transportation and traffic systems, create environmental emergency response plans, and allow a proactive approach to environmental responsibility vs. reactive."

• It is known that local telco China Mobile Communications Corporation has been working closely with IBM's China Telecommunications Solutions Center to deploy a  business intelligence platform that supports service creation, deployment, execution, integration and management. IBM claims that China Mobile is now able to reduce time-to-market for new products, increase revenue and improve customer service with end-to-end monitoring and analysis. It is not known if the business analytics centre in Beijing is involved.

The Beijing center will employ up to 300 consultants, mathematicians and software specialists at first and recruit or retrain up to 300 more as demand grows. It is unclear if any of these are new jobs but a portion are 'reassigned' existing IBM consultants and scientists.

September

IBM Business Analytics Centre of Competency in Bangalore, India. It's focus will be on Web 2.0 Analytics, Risk and Fraud Analytics, Financial Analytics, Customer Analytics and Enterprise Business Analytics Strategy. It also appears to have more of a regional focus whereas the Beijing centre looks to be focussed exclusively on the domestic Chinese market.

IBM acquires RedPill Solutions. A privately-held company headquartered in Singapore. RedPill provides advanced customer analytics services to businesses in industries such as financial services, telecommunications, technology and hospitality. RedPill is a specialist customer management services firm with significant expertise in areas such as churn management, segment propositions, segmentation, risk management and market/opportunity assessment. RedPill has delivered engagements across in 17 different countries in Asia Pacific and the Middle East and has offices in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the United Arab Emirates.

November

QlikTech named Asian Rising Star. The Business Intelligence software vendor, has been named by MIS Asia Magazine as a Rising Star in its annual Strategic 100 IT vendors. QlikTech now has 650 customers and over 50 partners in Asia Pacific.

December

Neteeza Opens in China. The company opened a Sales (they call it a Proof of Concept) Center in Beijing. Their existing presence includes Japan, Korea, Singapore and Australia.

Alterian opens a full-service operation in Singapore, expanding from their initial APAC presence in Sydney.

MAIA Intelligence wins Red Herring Top 100 Award. MAIA is an Indian startup that produces a low cost but powerful BI software suite. The company was founded in 2006, has grown rapidly with over 10,000 users of 1KEY BI products. It has also been featured in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for ICT in India 2008 & BI Trend Report 2008-09 APAC.

Tata Consultancy Services is a Gartner leader. TCS is placed in the leaders quadrant for the 'Magic Quadrant for Oracle Outsourcing, North America'.

Is 2010 The Year Asia Cuts the Apron Strings?

It has been many years since I last worked in China and a couple of recent announcements led me to wonder what has been going on there recently. When I started to review what I knew about analytics in China I started thinking about Asia in general. Would 2010 be the year we would see an upswell of analytics with a distinctly Asian (as opposed to US) flavour?

What makes Asia Different?

Analytically, it's both the size of the potential market as well as its fundamental differences from the West that intrigue me. Take a look at the mobile market for example:

 

So not only is the absolute size greater but 75 per cent of mobile users own web-enabled phones - compared with only 41 per cent in the US. This data is care of Netpop Research. China is not alone in the region, IDC estimates that there are over 600 mn fixed line subscribers in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) and over 1.6 bn mobile subscribers.

Telco's in India expect 2010 to see Enterprise Mobility as a hot trend. According to local trade publication Voice&Data:

"Enterprises will be relooking at their entire IT architecture and strategize ways to ensure that the entire workforce – be it blue collar manufacturing employees, gray collar service employees or white collar management employees – is able to leverage and add-on to the intelligence available at the back office."

In the wired world, 5 of the top 10 most connected countries or territories are in Asia. South Korea led, where 95 percent of homes have broadband. Singapore and Taiwan are among the top five countries in terms of access to high-speed Internet, according to a survey released in 2009 by Boston-based Strategy Analytics.

The United States, where just 60 percent of households had broadband as of last year, ranked 20th in the survey of 58 countries. The firm predicted the broadband subscriber base in the Asia-Pacific region will grow on average by a further 15 percent a year between 2009 and 2013.

Strategy Analytics said South Korea's highly urbanized population and its government-backed broadband policy accounted for its high rate of broadband penetration.

Singapore ranked second on the list with household broadband penetration of 88 percent, followed by the Netherlands (85 percent), Denmark (82 percent), Taiwan (81 percent), Hong Kong (81 percent), Israel (77 percent), Switzerland (76 percent), Canada (76 percent) and Norway (75 percent).

Among other Asia-Pacific nations, Australia ranked 11th with 72 percent, Japan ranked 16th with 64 percent, New Zealand ranked 25th with 57 percent, China ranked 43rd with 21 percent and Malaysia ranked 44th, also with 21 percent.

Thailand ranked 51st with seven percent, Vietnam ranked 52nd, also with seven percent, the Philippines ranked 53rd with five percent, India ranked 57th with two percent and Indonesia ranked 58th with one percent.

Why Is Asia Important?

Technology spend across Asia excluding Japan (APeJ) is expected to grow strongly in 2010. Singapore-based Springboard Research's recent Asia-Pacific Predictions 2010 report is predicting 8.8 per cent growth. They put analytics as the #1 trend in 2010:

"Among the hot technologies for this year are analytics solutions that will make use of data and predictive modelling technology to help support business decision-making."

This prediction is similar, but more optimistic than that from the better-known IDC. They recently predicted that ICT spending in APEJ will reach $184 bn in 2010 with a 7.7% growth over this year. Analytics was their #2 trend for 2010:

"2010, IDC expects business analytics to emerge as a key technology area to help CIOs manage cost, comply with regulations, and most importantly, grow the business as information is treated as a strategic asset within the organization. More advanced and sophisticated forms of analytics solutions, are actively being implemented by organizations in the region."

IDC goes on to add a second analytic prediction with trend #9:

#9: Intelligent X: Building a smarter and more measurable world

IDC believes that 2010 will be a year of multiple 'intelligent' initiatives in Asia, as major governments and cities try to beat each other to reach the goal of securing foreign investment and foreign technology participation in this region. In these 'intelligent' initiatives, a new business model is emerging as a 'Holy Trinity' consisting of government, ICT vendors, and citizens; all three working in sync is required to make inroads in emerging countries.

From an ANZ perspective, the signing of the Free Trade Agreement between ASEAN, Australia and New Zealand (AANZFTA) in late 2008 should also expand activity as it includes provisions covering trade in services, together with investment, intellectual property, competition policy and economic cooperation.

More personal reasons for why Asia matters include:

• Large numbers of analytics graduates I meet from Bangalore, Chennai and Shanghai
• ETL and SQL outsourcing deals between ANZ and Asia
• Rise of leading BI Vendor centres of excellence in Asia (more on this in my next blog)
• Expansion of local BI players into South East Asia (and beyond).

In my next blog I will try to summarise what has been happening in analytics in Asia recently. I believe that we will see evidence of Asia coming out of the Global Financial Crisis in a stronger position than when they went in. Analytics in Asia is looking a lot more dynamic these days and many local organisations are not going to pay for the BI suites from the SOMIS (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAS) vendors when viable local options are around at a fraction of the price.

It's still too early for Silicon Valley to start worrying - but it may be time to start taking notice of what's happening to the East of La La Land.

Public Information

In a past life I co-founded and led a company specialised in the analysis of publicly available textual information. The basic idea I had was that if you could read every newspaper published everyday, and throw in other easily accessible information sources like company filings to Stock Exchanges and national regulators, then you would learn a lot about:

• mergers and acquisitions
• investment strategies
• alliances and pilot projects using emerging information technologies.

The hunch was right and after 1 million lines of code and several million dollars, we had a system that could automatically extract meaning from news 24/7. We launched a subscription service that read thousands of articles each day and then visualised these activities. We sold many subscriptions to leading corporations and government agencies around the globe.

On the right is a print-out from that application. Everything was interactive and you 'surfed' through the 'mind maps' using a simple point and click interface. Here is a larger file that you can zoom into to explore: The Virgin Group.

In the course of this journey from start-up to a real company with cash flow we were presented with an interesting dilemma.

Early on in the history of the company we produced a detailed view of the personal investment strategy of the founder of one of the world's largest software companies. We did it by analysing the web of legal entities he had established and then tracking share transactions, venture capital and M&A deals and news reports, etc.

The end result was very interesting and a printed copy of one of the main mind maps was lent to a Board Member of Philips (the Dutch electronics group). By coincidence, this same founder whose investment strategy we had analysed, turned up for a meeting and he saw the chart in their office. Apparently he hit the roof and thought that he was the target of some sort of corporate espionage.

This got us thinking and because I had lived in the States, I immediately contacted our trusty lawyer. Our legal council advised us that in the US we ran the risk of being sued for breaching privacy laws. This was despite the fact that all of our source information was freely available.

As a side note, the problem was solved by us agreeing not to locate our technology on servers in the US. We remained offshore and (presumably) were much harder for US citizen's to reach us legally. It meant that we paid a little more for the data centre and internet traffic - but I think it was worth it.

Why am I writing this today? Well ever since then, I have had a keen interest in what public information is available and what you are allowed to do with it. So I read with interest the following article in Ars Technica:

Lobbyists beware: judge rules metadata is public record

The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that the metadata attached to public records is itself a public record. Given the frequency with which metadata outs lobbyists' and corporations' efforts to mask their own contributions to public debates, this is a good thing.

Ars Technica, By Jon Stokes | October 29, 2009

The Arizona state Supreme Court has ruled that the metadata attached to public records is itself public, and cannot be withheld in response to a public records request. Such a ruling on file metadata may not seem like a huge win for open government advocates, but it definitely is, given that metadata has unmasked more than one lobbyist's effort to influence Congress.

In the Arizona case, a police officer had been demoted in 2006 after reporting "serious police misconduct" to his superiors. He suspected that the demotion was done in retaliation for his blowing the whistle on his fellow officers, so he requested and obtained copies of his performance reports from the department. Thinking that perhaps the negative performance reports had been created after the fact and then backdated, he then demanded access to the file metadata for those reports, in order to find out who had written them and when.

The department refused to grant him access to the metadata, and the matter went to court. After working its way through the court system in a series of rulings and appeals, this past January an Arizona appeals ruled that even though the reports themselves were public records, the metadata was not. It turned out that Arizona state law doesn't actually define "public record" anywhere, so the appeals court relied on various common law definitions to determine that the metadata, as a mere byproduct of the act of producing a public record on a computer, was not a public record itself.

The case was then appealed to the Arizona state Supreme Court, which has now ruled that the metadata is, in fact, a public record just like the document that it's attached to.

Metadata follies, and the case of Google

If you want to know how important metadata can be in public policy deliberations, Google's history with it can be instructive, since the search giant has been both hurt and helped by metadata snooping.

Last year, the The Australian Competition Commission and Consumer Commission (ACCC) received hundreds of electronically submitted feedback letters opposing eBay Australia's decision to go PayPal-only for accepting auction payments. One of the most impressive letters was a 38-page missive that had obviously been written by someone with extensive and intimate knowledge of payment systems. A look at the letter's PDF metadata revealed that the author of the letter was none other than Google, which was upset that Google Checkout was being excluded in favor of PayPal. The metadata also revealed, embarrassingly enough, that the PDF had been written not in Google Docs, but in Microsoft Word.

The very next month, the tables were turned when the American Corn Grower's Association somewhat surprisingly threw its weight behind the idea that Congress should launch a hearing to look into the possible anti-trust implications of the Google-Yahoo advertising deal. CNET's Declan McCullagh took a look at the PDF letter that the group submitted to Congress, and found that it had been authored by a staffer at the LawMedia Group, a DC lobbying shop whose client list includes the anti-Google, anti-net neutrality National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

To leave Google's metadata mixups and go back even further in time, one of the most famous metadata lobbying goof-ups occurred in 2004, when Wired busted California Attorney General Bill Lockyer circulating an anti-P2P letter that, after a look at its Word metadata, appeared to have been either drafted or edited by the MPAA.

As open government projects that solicit feedback from the public gain traction at the federal and local level, these types of metadata-related discoveries will become more and more common. Guaranteeing that file metadata is available to the public will make help to ensure that we know who is trying to influence public discussion.

People complain (endlessly) about America - but we in Australia can only dream of having the public right to a tenth of the information made available in the US.

Does this disadvantage the practise of analytics in Australia? You bet - and we are a poorer nation for it.  

Now if I can just modify my code to automatically analyse the metadata of the datasets that the Australian Federal and State Governments are now releasing under FOI-like (Freedom Of Information) licenses maybe there are interesting things to be learnt.

Anyone interested? Malcolm??

Local Intelligence Beta Testers Wanted

As most of my readers know by now, I and a small group of like-minded people are building an online community for business intelligence, information management, data warehousing, analytics and performance management enthusiasts in Australia and New Zealand. Called the CORTEX for short.

We launched officially this year and membership is approaching 700 people. It's great to know that so many other people like the concept. Everyone is welcome and membership is free. OK, that's the end of the PR bull.

We are trying to regularly add new features and in the spirit of Google Labs we have just launched a one-click search function that scours the CORTEX for news and views on specific leading ANZ organisations. Currently we have the following industries covered:

• Construction and Property
• Financial Services
• Government, Health and Education
• Manufacturing and Distribution
• Publishing and Media
• Retailers
• Rural, Minining, Oil and Gas
• Telecommunications
• Tourism and Hospitality
• Transportation
• Utilities

I know that we have missed several organisations and I ask anyone who is active in these (or other) industries to:

• Beta-test the search function
• Suggest other organisations we should include
• Add news to the CORTEX local industry channels if you know of something that we are missing.

All comments and criticisms are welcome!

The Darker Side Of Analytics

I recently read an article in one of the major Dutch newspapers (warning - it's in Dutch!) about their Government's moves to prevent crime by profiling citizens. The announcement was made by the Minister Of Justice and, not surprisingly, it has caused some discussion within The Netherlands. I wonder what the reaction in Australia would be if the Federal Government announced that all Australians were to be profiled?

Here's what the Dutch Government is proposing:

• using 'digital techniques' (whatever they are) to create profiles of people
• initially this will consist of information on: 
• • banking 
  • flight 
  • internet use 
• citizen profiles will then be compared to profiles of convicted criminals
• if/when a match is found, government officials will be sent and email or sms alerting them of this 'fact'. 

The example use quoted by the minister is for a very worthy cause: preventing pedophiles from traveling to countries where child prostitution occurs.

But if you look at the wider picture: wow, the implications are serious and widespread!

I wonder how many times their 'digital techniques' will create false positives and (presumably) false information being sent out?

I remember a situation some years ago when I owned a company in Silicon Valley and still lived in Amsterdam. I was traveling very regularly between the two places and I was profiled by US Customs solely on the basis that Amsterdam is famous for tulips and a couple of more seedy chemical habits. The conversations were pleasant and short-lived - but I would hate to be having similar conversations if, say, my next business was in Bangkok and my own Government was telling a foreign country "watch out" for this guy simply because I had a pattern of travel to Thailand that was similar to some disgusting criminal who had served time in The Netherlands!

It couldn't happen, could it?

The Federal Government and Analytics

I have recently read the latest Australian Federal Government's report on innovation. The report is called 'Powering Ideas: An Innovation Agenda For The 21st Century'. It caught my eye as I was hoping to learn of a new impetuous for analytics. Well it was a fairly interesting read and our field did get a single mention - but interestingly only as a way of measuring the success of the innovation policy itself. There is no concept of using analytics to directly improve an organisation's performance, or fuel greater innovation of new products and services.

From page 29 of the report:

Measurement
is the only way
to be sure that
policies are
working and
resources are
being put to the
best possible use.

Next to this declaration is the only paragraph that mentions analytics: 

"The Australian Government has a duty to measure the impact of
specific innovation initiatives and the performance of the system as
a whole. This is the only way to be sure that policies are working and
resources are being put to the best possible use. Indicator analysis,
scorecards, and case studies are all commonly used for this purpose,
but they only tell part of the story. Econometric analysis has the
potential to tell us much more about how well the system is doing.
So do studies linking innovation data to statistics of other kinds
- financial, administrative, environmental, social and so on.
The Australian Government will work to collect better data on
innovation and develop new, more sophisticated analytical
capabilities. It will also produce an annual report on the
performance of the national innovation system. The report will
identify new opportunities and challenges, and provide regular updates
on implementation of the National Innovation Priorities."

Download 200907 PoweringIdeas_fullreport

It's all a bit too motherhood for me. Where are the specific criteria, KPI's, etc. Let's hope that they will be determined before, and not after, the funding decisions are made. I'm not holding my breath.

Interestingly, the report itself has been analysed using the innovative Leximancer text analysis tool. Leximancer is a software tool used to find meaning from qualitative data (typically text-based documents) and is a product of a small Australian company based in Brisbane. The software automatically identifies key themes, concepts and ideas by data mining large amounts of text (but not diagrams), and visually represents information in ‘concept maps’ showing the main relationships. These relationships can be examined in more detail by visually exploring major connections.

Analysis using Leximancer  was undertaken of all submissions to the Government Review that were in English, not hand-written or diagrammatical. Confidential submissions were not included. In all, 606 submissions were analysed. The maps display the frequency of the concept by the boldness of its text; the extent of the connectedness of the concepts is shown by size of concept point. The closer to the blue end of the spectrum, the more important the concept overall, reflecting frequency and connectedness. Here's an example from the analysis:

You can read the results of the analysis in 'A Content Analysis Undertaken By Prof. Mark Dodgson Of The University Of Queensland, Using Leximancer Software To Identify The Main Themes, Concepts And Ideas Identified In Submissions To The Review' here:

Download 2008 Leximancer_Submission_Analysis

While (analytically speaking) the only ray of light from the report is that someone did some textual analysis I don't despair. At least individual arms of the Government are increasingly cutting-edge. Examples include the military/intelligence community and the benefits they get from close cooperation with the US, and other agencies like the Australian Tax Office that have developed substantial and sustained analytic teams. Good news - but I have to go now and file my tax return. I have this strange feeling that someone is watching me!