Beating Steve Martin & Alec Baldwin with Business Intelligence
Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will host the 2010 Oscars in March according to the Independent newspaper. The nominations are in fact due to be released tonight, but will Business Intelligence (BI) spoil the party and beat Steve and Alex at their own game by predicting the winners ahead of tonight’s pre-show party?
'
In a bid to create some PR out of nothing, BI consultancy firm Concentra has ambitiously predicted the Oscar winners in the run up to the nominations tonight. Personally, I’ve seen so many ‘developer competition’ and ‘new platform augmentation’ stories already this year that I’m open to a bit of cheesy publicity. So here’s the scam…
Concentra says that it has used the Guardian’s DataStore collection of public data to feed its own Tableau BI platform and try to predict the mostly likely candidates for this year’s ceremony based on past awards won by films and individuals at the European Film Awards, Golden Globes and Screen Critics teamed with previous Oscar winners.
According to BI logic, Christoph Waltz, Mo’Nique and Jeff Bridges are among the top actors expected to receive the highly prestigious awards this year.
Now, any of you who are keen film buffs will know that there are some wild curve balls out there this year such as Tom Ford’s debut A Single Man starring Colin Firth. So did Concentra supply its BI engine with enough intelligence to track for genuinely remarkable talent that shines unexpectedly?
Would they for example have predicted Slumdog Millionaire?
I fear the answer is no.
You’ll see more mentions of Cameron’s Avatar and Tarentino’s Inglorious Basterds on this visual dashboard than you will of the latest Polish art house or gripping film noir love triangle.
But does this teach us a lesson for BI analysis in the workplace? Yes we know that the team tasked with data collation, management and preparation for the BI system will look for all the most important variables. But will they look for the unimportant ones too and help program for random unexpected events? This was a fun story, but it leads one to think that maybe we are being too superficial with our data.
Ask Steve Martin what he thinks and he’d just tell you that he is one wild and crazy guy – right?