Singapore Picks a Winner in Analytics

... I'm in Singapore again now, this time to help launch the Deloitte Analytics Institute (DAI). The Asian headquarters of this new organization has been established in partnership with the Economic Development Board of the Singapore government. The DAI's goal is to do research and thought leadership on the application of analytics to business and government. The Singapore government has provided some money to help meet these goals. I spoke today at the first of a series of public seminars on analytics; there are a number of other tangible outputs that the DAI has agreed to produce.

This is, by the way, a good decision on the SG government's part. Analytics make sense as a growth area for Singapore for several reasons:

• Some of the previous growth domains for the country, such as information technology manufacturing, have become somewhat commoditized;
• Singapore has scored highly (first or third) in every TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) ranking of mathematics achievement since 1995;
• Many Singaporeans speak excellent English - the language most often used to discuss analytics in business;
• Singapore has a strong industry foundation in financial services, one of the most analytical industries;
• Singapore's citizens are early and aggressive adopters of consumer technologies, which generate a lot of data for analysis.

In addition to the support for the Deloitte institute, Singapore's government has also provided substantial support for the Living Analytics Research Centre. The Centre, a research partnership between Carnegie Mellon and Singapore Management University, "seeks to make Singapore one of the world's premier locations for the development and applied use of real-time consumer and social analytics, as well as one of the world's leading centres for computational social science related R&D and education."

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