An interesting article at SearchCIO.com profiles the work of Atefeh "Atti" Riazi, CIO of the New York City Housing Authority and how she uses predictive analytics to challenge assumptions about public housing.
Public housing has lots of what she calls "urban legends and sacred cows." Analytics helps her gore them.
Said Riazi:
Here we were, ready to make huge investments on additional camera equipment before these findings showed that would not be a particularly useful expenditure.
IBM has been working with Riazi through its interest in smart buildings. Through that collaboration, Riazi says she has learned that tracking sometimes seemingly unrelated elements can help you see problems through a whole new lens. According to the article:
To foster the open-mindedness that analytics and predictive modeling require, Riazi urges CIOs to start adding some statisticians, mathematicians and sociologists to their staffs.
"We have to get out of our comfort zone, which means IT is not about deploying hardware and software. It is about intelligence, which is why IT professionals had better understand how to use data," Riazi said. Analytics is going to take the IT profession "from the place of 'thinking' to what I call the wisdom phase. It is not that 'I think, therefore I am,' but that 'I know, therefore I am," she said.
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