According to latest poll results from KDNuggets , salaries of analytic professionals have gone up in 2011.  

The analysis was based on about 250 respondents, from which 78% worked for a company, 18% for a University, and about 4% were self-employed.

The average US salary was estimated as $113,000, up about 10% from 2010.

This article was cited in ReadWriteWeb last week. Even though enterprises are investing in analytics type software, the key ability is to find the resources who can help in the process of funnelling relevant information through the software, analyze the results and produce relevant reports.

On the customer analytics front, it is gettting more interesting. The world has gone social. Conversations are happening all around us at lightning speed. People are making connections. Sharing their stories. And they’re waiting for businesses to listen to them. We enable that dialog, collaboration, and knowledge sharing across the enterprise. We know that “business as usual” is a foreign concept in the social world. And different platforms are revolutionizing how we communicate at work by harnessing the power of our social networks.  The ‘analytic geeks’ now have to make sense out of these complex interactions.

Clinical trial costs are skyrocketing amidst patient shortages, fewer drug approvals and limited growth in the number of available clinical investigators. At the same time, companies face stringent demands for more safety data — and patient recruitment stands as a pivotal roadblock. As pressure mounts and competition for patients intensifies, superior trial teams build resilient strategies for attracting and retaining patients, and their efforts are backed by sufficient resources.

Integrating recruitment into formal trial structure and process is always the challenge. Usually this requires the expertise of a full time patient recruitment specialist or a group of them.

We overheard an interesting initiative from ResearchAccess  about how online research is helping with clinical trials.

Corengi (short for “clinical options research engine”) is a website that allows patients to find out which clinical trials are clinically appropriate for them.  It turns out that for type 2 diabetes, there are almost 400 clinical trials ongoing in the United States.  Any one patient, however, will be qualified for less than 10% of them.  Corengi has a simple medical questionnaire that allows them to eliminate some of the trials and focus on those that might be appropriate.  (For example, if, for a specific trial, it’s required that a patient is on insulin – and the patient isn’t – it hides this trial from the match results.)   Corengi includes a comprehensive set of trial data updated on a daily basis from federal sources such as clinicaltrials.gov.

Go check them out!

Quoting from OpenForum :

Design thinkers gather information that helps us understand customer experiences. Once we understand the people surrounding our business challenges—their needs, desires, problems and aspirations—we can identify relevant business opportunities. Then we experiment our way forward, prototyping new solutions and getting these solutions out in front of customers as early as possible. As we prototype, we learn from people by observing, gathering feedback, and refining our approach. This central iterative cycle of learning—trying out new business possibilities, gathering feedback and refining the ideas—is what makes design thinking unique.

If you consider yourself to be a design thinker, what tools do you use to gather information about your customer’s experiences.  Do you poll them, ask them to fill out survey, or do you do you call them in to research groups?.  Do you have a less interrupting way of observing your customers ? .

Check this mindmap to see how the simplistic process looks like.