Group items tagged

a lot of articles calling data scientists and statisticians the jobs of the future

there are more immediate needs that, when addressed, will have a much greater business impact.

Right now we have huge opportunities to make the data more accessible, more “joinable” and more consumable. Leaders don’t want more data – they want more information they can use to run their businesses.

1. Project Sponsorship and Governance 2. Project Management 3. Development Team (Core Team) 4. Extended Project Team

1. Project Sponsorship and Governance IT and the business should form a BI steering committee to sponsor and govern design, development, deployment, and ongoing support. It needs both the CIO and a business executive, such as CFO, COO, or a senior VP of marketing/sales to commit budget, time, and resources. The business sponsor needs the project to succeed. The CIO is committed to what is being built and how.

2. Project Management Project management includes managing daily tasks, reporting status, and communicating to the extended project team, steering committee, and affected business users. The project management team needs extensive business knowledge, BI expertise, DW architecture background, and people management, project management, and communications skills. The project management team includes three functions or members: Project development manager - Responsible for deliverables, managing team resources, monitoring tasks, reporting status, and communications. Requires a hands-on IT manager with a background in iterative development. Must understand the changes caused by this approach and the impact on the business, project resources, schedule and the trade-offs. Business advisor - Works within the sponsoring business organization. Responsible for the deliverables of the business resources on the project's extended team. Serves as the business advocate on the project team and the project advocate within the business community. Often, the business advocate is a project co-manager who defers to the IT project manager the daily IT tasks but oversees the budget and business deliverables. BI/DW project advisor - Has enough expertise with architectures and technologies to guides the project team on their use. Ensures that architecture, data models, databases, ETL code, and BI tools are all being used effectively and conform to best practices and standards.

ERP vendor selection. As the following graph shows, the primary candidates for ERP software were SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Epicor, and Infor:

The cloud question. Despite the hype, only 14 percent of respondents are using ERP delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). Although the best cloud vendors can deliver superior security and reliability than most internal IT departments, market momentum to ERP in the cloud is not there yet, as the following diagram illustrates:

Important lessons. Implementing an ERP system is always complex because the deployment drives changes to both data and processes that extend across departmental boundaries inside the organization.

The tag-management industry is growing rapidly, as tags are critical to gathering data about your customers.

It's the early days for tag management, but the industry is growing rapidly because it's not so much about tags, but about the bigger challenge of using digital data.

Where does tag management fit in the data picture? Here's an example someone shared with me recently: He had gone to an antivirus product's website, read the reviews, and bought the software. In the days that followed, however, he suddenly began to see banner ads from that same software maker whenever he visited CNN, ESPN, and other favorite websites. The software maker knew he had visited its website, but not that he already bought the product. They were retargeting him with banner ads at unnecessary cost and no purpose.

Complete Order to Cash(O2C) Techno-Functional flow in R12

These are few of the benefits of implementing a good quality CRM All of your clients’ information is stored in one place, it’s easy to update and share with the whole team. Updates by colleagues should be saved immediately. Every member of your team will be able to see the exact point when your business last communicated with a client, and what the nature of that communication was. CRMs can give you instant metrics on various aspects of your business automatically.  Reports can be generated. These can also be used to forecast and plan for the future. You will be able to see the complete history of your company’s interaction with a client. Calendars and diaries can be integrated, relating important events or tasks with the relevant client.  Suitable times can be suggested to contact customers and set reminders.

Finding one system that will fit your needs in one package may not be possible, so be aware that you may need to customise it to fit into your company. There are infinite possibilities here so don’t get too carried away as costs will rise accordingly.

Ensure that the CRM works on mobile devices and can be accessed remotely. Employees aren’t necessarily sat at their desks when it needs to be used or updated. Real-time updates are necessary for ensuring that clients aren’t contacted twice with the exact same follow up.

The balanced scorecard is one popular methodology for linking strategy, technology, and performance management. Other methodologies, such as applied information economics, combine statistical analysis, portfolio theory, and decision science in order to help firms calculate the economic value of better information. Whether you use a published methodology or develop your own approach in-house, the important point is to make sure your BI activities are keyed to generating real business value, not merely creating pretty, but useless, dashboards and reports.