Jason Kolb provides a great post on predictive analytics. Its powerful stuff, but technology is values-neutral and can cause issues just as it can help solve them. To see analytics applied for good, check out this presentation by Hans Rosling.

As with any complex system, its easy to get things wrong and you need to be really smart to really screw up. But investment banks won’t try and stop predicting the future and people won’t stop playing on the edge. The predictive analytics genie is definitely out of the bottle, the goal is make sure these predictions have some controls, and understanding of data lineage and regulations around risk. That’s one of the reasons why I think Information Development is so important.

One of the topics I have been writing about for a while is the concept of open-sustainability. open-sustainability is an approach that applies-information centric techniques to solve challenges related to Sustainable Development. The complete framework for an integrated approach to sustainability is available at www.open-sustainability.org.
but you can also read about it on the MIKE2.0 site.

We set up MIKE2.0 and open-sustainability so they work together, drawing in sustainability professional to have an information-centric view and information management professionals to the sustainability challenge.

One of the key principles is around balancing the different dimensions of the problem. Bill Johnston also wrote a good post on this subject. Only with sophisticated IM techniques can be find this balance – spreadsheets aren’t going to do the trick.