Founder and Core Contributor
Hello and thank you for visiting. I am the founder of Erudite Analytics, and the core contributor to services outlined on this site. The following is a brief self-introduction which offers a summary of my professional background and my personal hobbies; my full professional bio can be found here. You may also enjoy listening to my recent big data / business analytics discussion on New Hampshire's WBNH 105.1 or take a look at a short write-up in a local newspaper.
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Andrew Banasiewicz, PhD
My Pursuits and Passions
Let me begin with a broad self-characterization: I love adventure in many different forms, including exploring new ideas, new habitats, and testing my limits, both intellectually and physically. I founded Erudite Analytics in 2013 with the goal of offering independent research & analysis services, focused primarily on statistical estimation of organization-specific exposure to executive, casualty, and other risks. Prior to founding Erudite Analytics I spent nearly two decades with risk management and marketing organizations as a senior-level quantitative analyst specializing in predictive analytics, text mining, and impact measurement as means of data-substantiated decision-making.
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As a corporate analytics professional I have had the opportunity to work with numerous Fortune 500 organizations spanning a wide range of industries including energy, automotive, financial services, pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods, gaming & hospitality, to name just a few. That broad, cross-industry experience not only provided me with numerous opportunities to immerse myself in many different types and sources of data, but has also strongly contributed to shaping of my current decision-making research and risk estimation work. For instance, the Erudite Analytics' multi-attribute methodologies for estimating the likelihood and severity of company-specific exposure to securities class action litigation can be seen as products of more than a decade of evolutionary data-method-outcome thinking and approach re-engineering; similarly, our current methodology for estimating the likelihood of adverse development of casualty claims can also be seen as a product of a multi-year, cross-industry, improvement-minded analytical re-engineering process.
An important contributor to my applied work is theoretical research, which is focused on developing a sound conceptual foundation for the largely practice-shaped domain of organizational threat assessment. With that goal in mind, my first book, Risk Profiling of Organizations, originally published in 2009, outlines an approach for amalgamating of multi-source and multi-type data into an organization-specific risk profile, while my more recent (2017), risk analytics focused work, Threat Exposure Management, details a comprehensive planning and management framework meant to unify the now-distinct disciplines of enterprise risk management, business continuity planning, organizational resilience, and change management under a common planning and management umbrella.
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Around 2018 I turned my attention to the topic of evidence-based management, and have since contributed five books focused on that broad topic. The first of those was Evidence-Based Decision-Making, published in 2019, details a conceptual framework, along with the enabling how-to calculus, to guide amalgamation of the totality of decision-related empirical and experiential evidence. I was delighted to learn that it captured the attention of book critics at Book Authority, who picked it as their #1 Best New Decision Making Book to Read in 2019. I further expanded on those ideas in my 2021 work titled Organizational Learning in the Age of Data, in which I tackled notions of human-machine interactions, informational literacy, and data-enabled creativity. I subsequently turned my attention to the idea of data analytic literacy, devoting the entirety of my like-titled 2023 book to that critically important set of conceptual 'know-why' and applied 'know-how'.
My most recent work, just released in the latter part of 2024 is titled Probabilistic Benchmarking. It frames the notions of benchmarking and baselining as two complementary but distinct mechanisms of comparative assessment that make use of informational contents of organizational data to contribute unbiased, systematic, and consistent evaluation of outcomes or states of interest; in a more general sense, its goal is to re-cast the idea of assessment standards in the context of data-derived estimates, to better align the practice of comparative assessment with the emerging realities of the Age of Data.
In addition to my hands-on risk estimation work, I am also deeply involved in educating of the next generation of high-functioning business professionals. To that end, over the past 15 years I served as a full-time professor of business analytics at several Boston-area colleges and universities, and I also had the pleasure of guest lecturing at several US, European, Asian, and Australian academic institutions; I currently served as an academic director and clinical professor at NYU's School of Professional Studies.
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My self-introduction would be incomplete without mentioning my less cerebral interests, which include scuba diving and endurance sports. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience some truly amazing underwater wonders, including Australia's Great Barrier Reef and Hawaii's Lanai 'cathedrals', and the thrill of cage diving with great white sharks off the coast of South Africa, or swimming with pink river dolphins in the Amazon; I feel just as fortunate to be able to continue to compete in endurance races, including New York, San Francisco, Hawaii and other marathons, in addition to numerous Ironman 70.3 mile and Ironman 140.6 mile triathlons.
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I thrive on intellectual and physical challenges, I love to explore and experience, and push the boundaries of what can and should be done. There is no clear distinction, in my mind and in my life, between my professional interests and personal hobbies, and my professional journey has been a search for intellectually and experientially rewarding engagements. And so while it may be hard for some to appreciate it, my research interests are not just professional in character, but are in fact deeply personal, in the sense of satisfaction I derive from engaging in analytically creative work.
