Haslam College of Business - University of Tennessee Business Analytics Faculty featured in The Economist

The Economist is publishing a series on “succeeding in the digital age,” which highlights the advancements in technology and data analytics in both the private and public sectors.

UT Business Analytics and Statistics Department Head, Dr. Chuck Noon, and Professor Emeritus Ken Gilbert were both featured in the series.
Their quotes featured in The Economist are in the article excerpt below:
“Kroger ‘has figured out how to build customer loyalty by personalising [its] marketing strategies,’ says Ken Gilbert, professor emeritus of the department of statistics, operations and management at the University of Tennessee and a development team member of the incubator Cherokee Farms Innovation Campus. ‘Customers are impatient and spoiled, so you’ve got to make yourself easy to do business with.’ Measuring the return on investments like these can be tricky. A traditional cost-benefit analysis is inadequate for businesses that are embracing mobile, social and big data, experts say, because the technologies are new and changing rapidly, thus making ROI difficult to forecast. ‘The danger in making a decision in an environment of uncertainty is that you can make bad assumptions,’ says Mr Noon. ‘What we would envision today might be very different from a year or two or three from now, so [the ability to embrace change is] something that has to be built into the DNA of an organisation.’
‘The real question is: Do you stay with [legacy systems] or do you go to something else that has an additional investment and the pay-off will be much greater?’ Dr. Chuck Noon.”

The full article from The Economist can be found here.