In just over a week's time four of the Lumesse team including CEO Matthew J Parker will be riding around 350 miles from the start of the Tour de France in Liege  back to the Olympics in London in support of Right to Play. 

If you are not aware of Right to Play, have a look at Right to Play to read about how the charity supports children across the world to play and learn how to play; every kid's right. 

A year before the first banking crisis I sat next to a super smart guy at dinner who explained the logic behind the hedge fund he had started. He confidently and a little smugly talked through the power of the models and algorithms he had built to predict market movements and to give his fund and his clients an edge. I'm no expert in modelling financial markets but did ask a simple question: how would his models react to a combination of circumstances that had historically never existed before? The answer was unsurprising - the models couldn't predict what would happen as the data wasn't there. In fact the guy suggested I was pretty insane to even suggest this, after all we had years and years of complex data available to show what happens in the event of almost any set of circumstances, so why should anything unforeseen happen?

Recently Josh Bersin came to London and spoke at the Lumesse European Customer Summit Engage 2012. In amongst the many pearls of wisdom was a big statement: the biggest barrier to HR organisations becoming strategic is the lack of ability to analyse and understand data.