This is Biff. Biff Makes Data Driven Decisions. Biff is Smart. Be like Biff!

This article was originally posted on the Loom Systems blog located here: https://blog.loomsystems.com/2016/11/13/this-is-biff-biff-makes-data-driven-decisions-biff-is-smart-be-like-biff/

Back to the future is here.

So if anyone was following the news recently, The Chicago Cubs won the world series! We have a President-elect that looks like Biff, and we even have those cool Nike shoes with power laces.

Granted, in the original movie, all of these things happened in 2015, so we are only a year off, but still pretty cool that with the exception of a flying car, the original movie was able to predict to some extent that these things would happen.

Don’t forget, this movie came out in 1989, so anything they could accurately predict, would be quite spectacular, let alone multiple predictions.

The producers were probably thinking of outlandish things that would never happen, except that some of them did. 

But one thing that still makes my brain turn is being able to predict the future.

Well,sort of!

We all remember that the key to Biff Tannen’s success was his ability to get a sports almanac that ranged from 1950-2000 that included the scores of all major sports and the original Biff from the 50’s uses this to get rich, making bets on all kinds of sporting events and becoming a tycoon that rules practically everyone and everything.

It would be really cool to be able to tell the future. Heck, it would be cool to understand that major events are happening as they happen, and not as a post-mortem, how-do-I-deal-with-this, WTF just happened incident.

What if we actually could predict the future? I know that this is a heavy philosophical question, one that undoubtedly would even have an effect on choices we make and their consequences (and I can tell you right now that eating pizza at 12AM will not be a good choice, without being clairvoyant).

What if we could base our decisions on hard information.

That’s what Biff did. He had hard data.

He knew who was going to win, when they were going to win and how much they were going to win by.

He wasn’t exceptionally smart, the movies show us that. In fact, he was an idiot and a misogynist/sexist, except that he made informed decisions. That was his strength.

In our Business/IT world, we are constantly striving to make data-driven decisions. Information is power.

What we need is a machine to be able to assist us in what decisions to make.

Enter AI.

Humans are good at making decisions when they know what the outcome will be(again, put that Chinese food in the garbage, it’s from last Friday man!). But we struggle with the data processing. That is why we have machines to process the data, and we tell it what to look for.

That’s how Log Analysis tools and Event Management tools work. They process mountains of machine data, event logs, Syslogs, application logs and more to be able to try and see patterns.This is really difficult. So you end up having analysts sitting in front of multiple screens trying to figure out what course of action to take.

No longer.

Loom Systems offers a Log analysis and Root cause analysis platform that will allow you, the decision maker, to stream data from different sources, structure the data by itself, learn what anomalies, trends, keyword errors, and correlations are happening within the machine data. Loom Systems will then alert you when there is a problem at your doorstep (seconds after the problem initiates) what the root cause of the problem is, so that you can fix it.

Not sure how to fix it? Loom Systems will give you that as well.

It’s the whole package.

Be like Biff. Make data-driven decisions.