I'm a total sucker for geographical data viz and lately I've found myself losing countless hours exploring CartoDB's growing community gallery of maps. Seriously, if you need some visual inspiration today head on over to their site and marvel at the beautiful intersection of geography, data and creativity.

As someone who works in the private sector, or more specifically, in marketing, I’ve seen data applied in some pretty manipulative ways to make a point or validate an untested hypothesis. if you're working in the field of marketing analytics and you care about being truthful you'll always struggle to find the right balance between time, cost and rigour. But not everyone understands the importance of rigour when it comes to truthful interpretation of data, and worse, some don’t care.

Whether you're starting from scratch or looking to evaluate an existing analytics practice, it's important that you review the resources and investment in and output of analytics on a routine basis. I've come across many cases where a client is investing in data and analytics but they end up being heavy on reporting while being light on actual insight.

What’s the ROI of data analytics? Increasing your speed to insight or speed to action is one way to look at the returns on your investments in data

The objectives and needs of your measurement practice are unique, complex, and vary not only on your business context, but the personnel within your organization that use your marketing data to make decisions. So why do we measure? This is the first of two articles where I explore why we  invest time, money and resources into measuring marketing performance.

During my master’s degree I published a thesis, titled Service Systems and Social Enterprise: Beyond the Economics of Business. Using the domain of service science as a lens, my thesis explored how social enterprise organizations could inform the unfolding discourse within the service science discipline, which, at its nascent time was primarily focused on applying its conceptual frameworks to for-profit organizations.

​Building an effective measurement practice either within your organization or in concert with partnered vendors and/or agencies can be a monumental task. Using a service science lens, in this article I explore how people, knowledge, information and technology are essential considerations for how you build and grow your measurement and reporting (M&R) strategy.