Business intelligence vs. business analytics: Where BI Matches into your Corporate strategy
Traditionally, enterprises have targeted their information around business intelligence, but the rise of predictive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, is changing the equation. In the last few decades, organizations have turned to innovative solutions to handle workloads, preserve profitability and ensure competitiveness in their respective businesses. BI solutions accumulate and examine actionable information with the objective of providing insights into enhancing company operations. Are you on the lookout for strategies to understand your business operations? What about find pain points in your workflows? How about examining large data sets to draw insights that are valuable? Analysts and consultants agree that understanding the distinctions between business intelligence and other analytics programs, in addition to the value each brings to the venture. We break down where business intelligence matches in the range of information offerings available today — and the way business analytics is growing, thanks to changes in tools, tactics, and personal needs. Business intelligence vs. business analytics Business Analytics includes approaches and technologies you can use to get and explore your company’s data, with a view to pulling new, data-driven insights to improve business planning and boost decision-making process. Analytics in the broadest sense applies to all technology-enabled difficulty activities. Generally, this involves using predictive analysis and modeling to establish trends, figuring out why things are happening, and making an educated guess about how things will pan out in the future. Business Intelligence is about accessing and exploring your company’s data. And, again, the ultimate aims are to understand how the company is doing, make better-informed decisions which enhance performance, and create new strategic opportunities for expansion. BI is more concerned with the what’s and the how’s than the whys. Business Intelligence lets you employ selected metrics to potentially enormous, unstructured data sets, and covers data mining, querying, online analytical processing (OLAP), and reporting as well as business performance monitoring, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Business intelligence includes services and tools to transform data into actionable intelligence that educates an organization’s strategic and tactical business decisions. It is what enables a company to collect, examine and current analysis of information. If you’re working with masses of raw information, you need extensive control over how you use that data, and you also would like to draw out your requirements and conclusions from the figures, the tools and methods you use will likely fall under BI, instead of BA. Selecting Between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics Organizations have begun to find that content and data shouldn’t be regarded as different features of data management but rather managed in an integrated enterprise strategy. BI utilizes past and present data to maximize the current for present achievement. BA uses the past and assesses the data to prepare businesses for the long run. Size Up Your Requirements Traditionally, business intelligence vendors targeted ventures mostly, but currently, there’s a paradigm change of BI moving to small companies and midsize organizations. Self-service BI is a significant focus of those smaller businesses. Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) is a method of data analysis that permits users to gain access and operate with corporate information although they don’t have a desktop in analytical or information science. It typically offers a user-friendly UI and does not involve communicating, which means that your average joe can run it. Pick with Intention Deciding on the solution for the company is dependent upon your intentions. If you’re happy with your business model as a complete and mostly want to enhance operations, boost efficiency and meet organizational objectives, business intelligence could be an optimum solution. Specifically, businesses that rely on real-time reporting tend to lean toward BI since they’re worried about what they could improve from the here and now. Businesses which need extensive data (e.g., the demand for data warehousing) and instinctive reporting needs to consider company intelligence seriously. BI has the additional benefits of targeting a company’ weak places and providing actionable insights into those issues. Business intelligence tools are excellent options for supervisors who wish to enhance decision making and comprehend their business’s productivity, work procedures, and workers. Then, with this knowledge, enhance their company from the bottom up. If you want help in gaining more insight from your data for better decision, then Advaiya’s experts can help you. Contact us here
4 things about BI reporting your boss wants to know
BI reporting is referred to the process of providing information or reports to end -users through a BI solution. Business Intelligence Reporting can give any organization complete control over all its data, helping to drive more valuable insights and empower employees to meet and even exceed their goals. Here is what BI reporting can do for you: It makes data analysis fast, accessible, and hassle-free. BI reporting platforms are extremely easy to use. You can build dynamic charts, graphs, custom dashboards and generate reports in a matter of minutes. Within the copious amounts of data, you can find the answers you need immediately. For example, Microsoft’s Power BI provides natural language query. Just type in a natural question and watch Power BI produce the exact data you asked for. Some of the best BI reporting tools enable you to take your data on the road. The Power BI mobile app gives you access to all your analytics wherever you go. It increases collaboration across the board. BI reporting platform helps you bring all your data under one roof. This ensures everyone can finally work together on the same data and changes are reflected in real-time. Allows you to share your data insights intelligently. Unlike manual reporting, BI reporting enables flexible controls that let you send the exact data you want to the exact people you want in the exact way you want. The most up-to-date analytics anywhere. Only BI reporting can give you real-time data analysis, ensuring your employees are never left behind. It lets you manage all your data with ease. BI reporting allows you to curate your content with accuracy. You can easily control access permissions per user, data source, or even individual lines on a report. It also enables you to build a holistic data governance strategy. You can create a data management plan in line with your organization with auditing controls. Stop worrying about your data’s security. With more data controls, as well as secure infrastructure provided by BI platforms these days, you can rest easy. It saves you both money and time. Look for platforms that offer value for every buck you spend. One of which we can confidently talk about is Microsoft’s Power BI. The competition can’t touch its value. No other product offers as much power for as little price as Power BI. Don’t get distracted by data spikes. BI reporting platforms will also automatically manage unexpectedly high data loads for you. Microsoft Power BI can give your organization insights that will drive its future growth and has all the above-mentioned features. If you want to learn more about it, try taking a guided learning experience through all its features or sign up for a free demo. Now get out there and go convince your boss! Want information about our BI reports and dashboards solutions? Click here
5 ways to turn business intelligence into business growth
We’re in a digital transformation era where data is more valuable than ever. Organizations would have the capacity to have an aggressive edge if they genuinely comprehend the intensity of information and advance the utilization of information in central leadership. It’s the key to smooth functionality and success of everything from BFSI to manufacturing to healthcare industries. Data has become the lifeline of organizations. Big data, as we define it, is structured or unstructured data, so massive in volume that it becomes difficult for traditional software tools to analyze them. But thanks to the improvement in big data technologies, companies can now take strategic decisions in minutes rather than hours or hours if not in days. Acting on big data catalyzes strategizing an organization’s action plan. And this is where Business Intelligence comes into the picture. Let’s have a look at how to turn BI into business growth using big data. Teamwork and Collaboration: One of the main benefits of using modern day BI tools is their ability to provide a platform that allows analyst, data scientists, decision makers to work collaboratively and act sensibly on approaches for solving the main challenges of a company. Collaboration offers a lot of benefits, and it adapts to broader workplace trends. With the help of visual analytics and the power of self-service BI, all the members working on a data project are now able to collaboratively work on one problem with real-time access to all the features of the BI tool. Hence, improving the overall operational efficiency of your business. Creating your business plan and Big Data roadmap implementation: Advanced analytics has become an integral part of the big data ecosystem today. Just accumulating data doesn’t work. We expect every business user and IT person to have basic knowledge of BI if they want to be competitive in the job market. Understanding how to interpret data isn’t just for IT professionals; every person interacting with data will require some degree of data literacy. Analyzing the information enables you to strategize your moves. You need to take appropriate action based on your data analysis to remain competitive and productive. Optimize Marketing Campaigns: Comprehend the market situations. By breaking down the enormous information, you can show signs of improvement in current market conditions. For instance, by investigating clients’ buying practices, an organization can discover the items that are sold the most and deliver items as per this pattern. By this, it can get ahead of its competitors. With the help of Big data, organizations thus can improve decision making in marketing campaigns. Identifying KPIs and Implementing BI Strategy: Companies which lay emphasis on KPIs grow faster than the companies which do not. Gone are the days when business users were dependent on IT for dashboards and reports. KPIs are quantifiable values and are utilized to demonstrate how feasibly and precisely an organization can accomplish its business goals. KPIs are at the center of a suitable BI technique of any organization. KPIs indicate which areas need improvement and which ones are performing well. Along these lines, it is basic to distinguish the key performing KPIs. Identify trends to stay competitive: The analytics industry is changing at a rapid pace. Latest updates are coming now and then. For example, if we consider Power BI, then there are monthly updates of their products. Recognizing what’s happening around and advancing your organization nearby those progressions can keep you aggressive. You need to keep yourself informed to identify and then take advantage of new opportunities. So, the critical question here is, why suddenly there is a lot of emphasis on BI? And the answer is straightforward. It is because of the rate at which data is generated these days. It is estimated that the amount of data accumulated in the past 2-3 years have surpassed the total data generated in the history of humanity. So, making proper use of data to drive intelligent business decisions is the need of the hour. In today’s data-centric world, it has become even more important to apply business intelligence strategies to Big data. By leveraging the power of Big data and business intelligence, businesses can improve decision making. Traditionally, data management and analytics have resided in various parts of the organization. Separating authoritative limits and making better incorporation between IT and business offices is a fundamental advance making a course for effective change.
10 Keys to a Successful Business Intelligence Strategy
Business intelligence (BI) is vital for business growth but receiving benefits from BI requires more than just implementing the technology that is used to enable it. We have been hearing the buzzword ‘Business Intelligence’ from the past couple of years, how it helps in creating new business opportunities and making informed business decisions. Business intelligence (BI) is the key for organizations to stay pertinent in today’s ever-changing business landscape. Following are the ten essential components of any successful BI strategy: BI is more than a technological initiative First things first – it’s important to know that to succeed in deploying BI, one must have the support of key business departments. First, IT needs to be involved to ensure proper data integrity, governance and actual implementation. Also, stakeholders with different business areas should be involved throughout the BI deployment process. Understanding who will use what type of data and for what purposes can help in showing the right information needed thus guiding you in effective decision making. Have a strong validation process Remember, quality outweighs quantity. Focus on making selected things better rather than trusting a lot of things that you suspect of producing faulty insights. The validation process of your organization needs to be agile and should also respond quickly to the latest BI functions. For instance, a BI tool generates reports on a company’s net sales figures. If that tool uses sales data but is not able to figure out the number of sold items that were returned, the final information provided is not useful. You don’t want people to comment “I don’t trust the data” thereby making the report worthless. So, focus on having a robust validation process. Prioritize business problems over data Your marketing team spots a customer churn problem and needs to know why customers are leaving. The focus should be on delivering the capabilities to answer the marketing question by first deciding what metrics need to be measured then accessing the data required to calculate those metrics, and lastly enabling marketing to slice and dice the data. So, the primary focus should be the business problem. Create a data storage plan Some organizations keep their data in an isolated data mart. Although it is quick and cheap, it will create additional silos whenever additional data storage is needed. Another thing needs to be considered whether you need to build a physical data warehouse or go with the semantic layers to link operational systems. Training & Reskilling Your company’s employees should have the basic knowledge of reporting skills. Along with the latest development in analytics, users of business analytics must be reskilled and trained. This will ensure that your organization is well equipped to support value-driven decision making. Your organization should always welcome a data-driven approach. This will help you make smart and intelligent decisions that are informed and impactful. Keep your data clean Now, that you have created a plan for data storage, it is vital that your organization’s data is clean. Cleaning data equals cleaning your analytics. Although cleaning the data could be a little difficult, clean data will help ensure the success of BI. Identify right key performance indicators (KPIs) KPIs are the values measure how effectively a company is achieving their business objectives. KPIs inform if your business is on track and the areas it is lagging. When a BI strategy is implemented, ensure that your KPIs align with your company objectives. Choose the right BI software/partner for your business Choosing the right BI tool/partner. While preparing for all the above steps, you will also need to find the right BI tool and implement it successfully. When implementing this process, choose between an on-premise or an online cloud-based BI solution. Try to start small but keep on scaling as your needs grow. This is a very important step, so do not rush through it. Also, go for free trials first. BI value assessment Assess and measure the ROI at every milestone defined in the strategy. This will help keep the BI initiative more focused on cost efficiency and in identifying improvements in migration and technology upgrades. Continuous assessment also provides an opportunity to make modifications to the strategy to re-align to the changing business needs thus maximizing ROI. Follow a phased approach Be persistent. An outcome based BI strategy always takes an iterative approach. Take small steps and be consistent. Start by building some dashboards and measuring a few KPIs. Gather feedback and repeat this process again with a new and better release. However, a good BI roadmap doesn’t have an end date. Your organization must keep on investing in it for long-term thereby refining data, processes and, reports. Conclusion For continuous business growth and an added advantage over your competitors; strategy, analysis and planning is required. A roadmap and constant evolution of strategies is very important to utilize the true benefits of a BI strategy. Without any direction and concrete plan, it is more likely you may get stuck in meaningless analytics. Thus, the above steps can be very useful for an organization to meet their business goals and to achieve a successful BI strategy.
Sitecore Multisite Architecture – Single Installation
Sitecore provides Multisite Architecture in which single installation of Sitecore can create multiple websites and publish them in the same Sitecore instance. This way it becomes accessible to hosts all an organizations website in a Single Sitecore Instance. In this blog, I am describing how we can quickly setup multisite in Sitecore with the single Sitecore instance. The benefits of using single Sitecore installation with multisite architecture includes: 1. Single set of user access credentials for access to all sites: Single Sitecore instance lets you use the same set of Sitecore managed users to access all your sites. 2. Easier to share content between sites: With single Sitecore instance, all content is directly accessible and addressable through Sitecore. It provides ability to share common data like templates, master pages, content items as data sources in renderings across sites. If Sitecore instances are separated, then content on the other instance is treated more as content on any external sites, and in that case, we would need to use RSS feeds, Web API or any Data Providers to provide content sharing between websites. 3. Easier tracking of visitors: All websites exists in a Sitecore instance share a single xDB database, so it becomes easy to capture web analytics information and get consolidated view across the different websites. Some key configuration points of multisite setup in Sitecore: Multiple websites are hosted in a single Sitecore installation, each site will be having its on properties and sharing common data like templates, master pages, items etc. The properties of each site are stored in the Sitecore configuration files. Each site in the Sitecore multisite structure runs with its own context created inside SiteDefinition.config file placed under “~WebsiteApp_ConfigInclude” folder. The context is defined for each site by adding a in the congif file having the site definition. Sitecore determines the site context based on the URL, hostname and the physical folder name specified in the site definition. For Ex. If two different sites are created in the content tree as below: Website 1:hostName=” website1.hostname.com”virtualFolder=”/”physicalFolder=”/”rootPath=”/sitecore/content/Website1″startItem=”/home”database=”web”domain=”extranet” allowDebug=”true” cacheHtml=”true” htmlCacheSize=”50MB” enablePreview=”true” enableWebEdit=”true” enableDebugger=”true” disableClientData=”false”/> Website 2: hostName=” website2.hostname.com” virtualFolder=”/” physicalFolder=”/” rootPath=”/sitecore/content/Website2″ startItem=”/home” database=”web” domain=”extranet” allowDebug=”true” cacheHtml=”true” htmlCacheSize=”50MB” enablePreview=”true” enableWebEdit=”true” enableDebugger=”true” disableClientData=”false”/> Binding with each hostname is then needs to be done in IIS as below: Below host entries are required to be added in the hosts file placed under “C:WindowsSystem32Driversetc” 1. 127.0.0.1 website1.hostname.com 2. 127.0.0.1 website1.hostname.com Now you can browse the websites using website1.hostname.com & website2.hostname.com. You can create more websites in the content tree and can add the site definition and host entries for them in IIS and host the file using the above steps.
Create a Digital Workplace with SharePoint and OneDrive
As technology evolves at a fast pace, trends at workplace change. Unlike traditional workplaces, where employees did their 9 to 5 job under the supervision of their managers, modern workplace is a completely different approach. Today organizations are spread across diverse geographical locations. Instead of working at one central geographical location, employees are working at various global locations and collaborating with team members at lightning speed. No matter where your workforce is stationed, technology has brought seamless connectivity amongst them. Physical boundaries are no longer a constraint. Employees can work in real-time, collaborate and communicate with each other in a very secure and effective manner. Since there are so many team collaboration options that come with their own unique set of features, it is intriguing to understand which technology can best suit your organizational needs. It is paramount to understand how to utilize the best out of the latest technology and existing investments. Since a modern workplace fixates on connecting multiple participants at various locations, it is supreme to decide how to best utilize the latest technologies. READ MORE INTERESTING ARTICLES MODERN INTRANET – COLLABORATE AT THE SPEED OF YOUR BUSINESS SharePoint and OneDrive connect the workplace with keenly intellective content management and intranets. Digital transformation is driving growth across Microsoft 365, SharePoint and OneDrive. Today many organization are using SharePoint and OneDrive. Customers are showing great interest in SharePoint online. A huge investment is also noted in OneDrive since last year. SharePoint and OneDrive make it effortless for you to collaborate. SharePoint has dependably been at the center of collaboration, people operating together on documents, lists, and libraries. With OneDrive, you can share your documents easily with individuals inside or outside the association in an exceptionally secure way. Its deep office integration powers rich co-authoring and allow real-time collaboration on these shared files with others. You can access all your office 365 files namely your personal work file, file shared with you by others, teams and your organization. The experience remains the same irrespective of the device you use whether it is a PC, Mac, Android device or iPhone or windows phone. With the all new simplified sharing experience, you can share a file or folder with specific people or even send a link that allows giving access to anyone inside or outside the organization. You can control access to a link for a specific period. It's additionally simple to view and adjust the granted permissions. SharePoint has also come up with the communication sites which is a pleasing and dynamic site which lets you reach a broad audience to keep the organization informed and engaged. Communication sites look classy on the web, on a PC or Mac, on mobile browsers, and in the SharePoint app. While your team site lets you share within your group as you’re working, a communication site lets your group share broadly and communicate its message across the organization. News published on a communication site surfaces on SharePoint home in Office 365 and on SharePoint mobile to all users who have access to the site. These communication sites can be easily created in a few seconds and you can very well configure the default web parts on your sites page to tell your story. You can customize page layout with new multi-column sections and drag-and-drop authoring with a range of richly functional web parts, including an image gallery, interactive Bing maps, videos from a Microsoft Stream channel and a new events web part. SharePoint 2019 is coming up with the all-new hub sites which will allow you to easily organize your intranet. These bring together associated sites to roll up news and activity, to simplify search and create cohesion with shared navigation and look-and-feel. SharePoint hub sites are very scalable, as these can be rearranged as your need changes. Power apps in SharePoint provide a great ease in creating custom forms for SharePoint list and library. You can create interactive and pretty-looking forms without many efforts. This provides the ability to seamlessly integrate the process into your work. New built-in approval flows let you send any document for approval with a custom message. The recipient can approve the request directly from a rich, actionable email message, so approval and feedback can be given without leaving your inbox. SharePoint has a great search feature that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence from Microsoft Graph API to surface more relevant and valuable result. The search content is included with your sites, files and news. Search can also be performed on people who belong to your organization. The result will include their skills, interest, projects etc. which are part of their office 365 profile. Along these lines, SharePoint is ceaselessly progressing towards giving a rich and consistent user experience, satisfying the necessities of the current Digital workplace and furthermore working towards future prerequisites.
Why Microsoft Power BI is the leader in business analytics?
Gartner recently positioned Microsoft’s Power BI as a leader in their annual magic quadrant for business intelligence and analytics Platforms. Also, for the second year in the row, Microsoft is placed farthest in vision within the leader’s quadrant. The reason behind this achievement is mainly because of the new exciting features Power BI team releases every month. Let’s have a look at few of the key features released in february and march 2018. 1. Formatting changes: We can now control the labeling of data in scattering and another kind of cartesian charts. This improves the readability of the report and helps in a situation when data labels overflow the bar in charts. You can also change the size and background color. Similarly, the size of the axis labels can also be controlled now to increase the percentage of the chart used by the axis labels. Another formatting feature added is the bar/column padding control. PBI desktop users can now search the analytics/formatting pane. This is helpful because there are many options available under these panes and it has now become easy to browse through them. A live report can be found at Financial Performance Analysis Report to see the formatting changes. 2. Sync slicer: In March, the PBI team delivered the most requested feature on the ideas forum. With the help of sync slicer feature, we can now synchronize all the pages where the sync slicer is applied. This means that if I select any slicer/filter on a page, the same filter selection would be applied to other pages where the sync mode is on. In the following image we can see that four locations are selected on Page 1 When we move to the next page, according to sync slicer information, of these four selected locations should be displayed. Please check the live report at Restaurant Real Time Report 3. Bookmarking: Though bookmarking was released in october 2017 , but now it is generally available. Bookmarking helps users create storytelling like experience. There are many use cases of bookmarks. Collection of bookmarks can help in presenting a series of insights thus enabling storytelling aspect of BI which is important these days. An interesting analysis of Profit Margin is available in this report which illustrates a company’s profit and total sales by changing margin and discount percentage. The Profit-Margin Analysis shows how much of profit would be generated on the specified values of discount, margin and target profit. Click on the image icons on top left corner to see the magic of bookmarks. 4. Custom visuals: One of the main reasons behind the success of PBI is custom visuals. Think of a scenario where you must show your data in the tree visualization format or in box and whisker plot. In other BI tools, you need to create the visualization from scratch thus taking a lot of time. But in Power BI you can make such as visual in few clicks. That is the beauty of custom visuals. There are many custom visuals available in the app source. Let me discuss few of the important custom visuals. TreeViz: TreeViz represents your data in a tree–like structure. It is good when one wants to organize the data hierarchically. Expand the nodes to see the next level in hierarchy. We can add as many levels we want. Funnel by MAQ software: The Funnel with Source custom visual is perfect to track any metric of interest over various stages along with the source of entry of the data point to the funnel. Network visualization and filter: This chart visualizes data as a network which lets you see flow between various categories. Categories are displayed as nodes and are connected via line. The size of the nodes represents the magnitude of a category. The network structure makes it possible to see the connections among many categories. 5. Tool tip: This feature is the latest one which was released in this month. Now we can create visually compelling tooltips which will pop up when you hover over visuals, based on report pages you create in PBI Desktop. These tooltips include all the visuals which are created in the report page of tooltip. This automatically filters the data point of the visual on which mouse is hovered. 5) Tool tip: This feature is the latest one which was released in this month. Now we can create visually compelling tooltips which will pop up when you hover over visuals, based on report pages you create in PBI Desktop. These tooltips include all the visuals which are created in the report page of tooltip. This automatically filters the data point of the visual on which mouse is hovered. These were few of the updates which Power BI releases every month. The Power BI team works continuously on improving and enhancing the capabilities of the entire Power BI ecosystem. This is making Power BI number one choice in the business intelligence and data visualization software industry.
Innovators guide to what changes and what doesn’t
As business leaders seek to implement new business models, build new products, or bring in new ways of working to their organizations, there is always an element of, to use Johnson’s phrase, triumph of hope over experience. The hope that ‘this time it would be different’ seems to get quashed quite often. The truth is that things indeed turn out to be different, but not in the ways you planned for. Innovation essentially takes the following process. There’s an idea, proposal, need or an option. This somehow gains the mindshare to be sufficiently assertive to be transformed into a plan. This plan gets its backers and participants, and something good sometimes happens! Now, while ideally this plan would be based on a careful assessment of environmental and internal factors, it would take into account contingencies and include a fair estimate of costs and time. In reality, that is at best an assumption. That too, mostly tacit. While having a great plan is not an end in itself, it is immensely valuable to be able to assess if there’s an undue optimism. The outcome of which can be not just a failed initiative but also consequent deepening of inertia, which can be the biggest innovation buster. This fragility is, to a large extent, inherent to innovation. But there is a lot that experience can teach, particularly about what can be expected to change and what not. Here are some key red-herrings: People: What would not change is that people will succumb to simple temptations. Excluding a small proportion of driven, strong-willed individuals, your team, your users and your customers would wander, lose attention and harbor doubts. This is more evident in longer, more complex initiatives. As planners underestimate time for sickness, vacation, meetings, and other “overhead” tasks, the sanctity of plans (and worse, goals) start to erode. Recently we finished implementation of a complex digital marketing and lead generation platform for a large technology company. It started with a lot of enthusiasm, but as various phases unraveled, and project complexities emerged, it became difficult to keep the team engaged especially as cross-function coordination meant multiple approval cycles and schedule adjustments. Resources: There would always be constraints. This is not going to change. Whether for material resources or for capabilities, innovation leaders would run into limitations. Howsoever large is the pool to tap from, it is the nature of an innovation initiative, that there would be needs that cannot be easily met. Effective leaders know this, and use all their skills and charm to work through this. But, such paucity can have a disproportionate effect on the initiative and innovation culture, and hence, the team and the organization must be adequately sensitized. A start-up that I worked with more than a decade back saw debilitating talent flight as a funding round got delayed. In many ways, that company could not ever recover that set back, as other competitors got head start and access to ready talent. Market: Whatever your target group is, whoever is your audience, it would change sooner than you think and in ways you may not have anticipated. A lot has been talked about ensuring that a business model is flexible enough to sense and accommodate these changes. It can, however, be very difficult to work with moving targets. Not managed well, it can lead to apparent lack of direction and apathy may set in. It also necessitates robust mechanisms to vet market cues and formulate right response. We all know of Coke reading the tea leaves wrong as it launched “New Coke”, and of Microsoft not getting on mobile wave sooner. Business Environment: Public opinion, economy, regulations, geo-political factors, etc., are ever changing. On the other hand, given their deep influence on how any initiative is executed, planning can only assume a limited range of changes in various environmental factors. Areas such as privacy and confidentiality, national security, environmental regulation, etc., are hot beds of public activity and initiative leaders whose projects traverse through any of these have to be careful. Again, inventiveness and flexibility can be possible antidotes. Given the uncertainty that surrounds the new regulations for example, it may not be easy even coping or complying – but there can be opportunities to turn them into advantages. Regulations such as Dodd-Frank or Basel III have provided an impetus to overhaul IT systems and operating procedures, for example. Energy efficiency norms have accelerated innovation globally in related sectors. Daniel Kahneman famously talked about the planning fallacy. The associated cost overruns and benefits shortfall can impair innovation. A dose of realism while being sensitive to probable (and improbable) changes is essential to sustain the culture of innovation.
10 most popular technology blog posts
In 2017, big topics reigned in the world of cloud and analytics. Whether the subject was integrating Power BI reports with Project Server, or determining how to make the most of new technologies like – Cloud and BI, or embracing Office 365 for a digital workplace, readers of the Advaiya Blogsite were seen hungry for acquiring new knowledge and have enjoyed our posts throughout the year.