The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

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The growing use of mobile devices — specifically smartphones and tablets — is having a major impact on the ways that people interact with the environment, with employers, and with each other. “Anytime, anywhere” access to voice communication was made possible by cellphones, and now (more…)

Thanks to the wild popularity of smartphones such as iPhone and Blackberry, tablets such as iPad, and the apps that work with it, we have become the mobile generation, increasing using mobile devices for accessing the information we consume in our daily lives.   Market research supports this shift – according to a recent report by Gartner, worldwide smartphone shipments in Q2, 2011 grew by 74% over the same quarter last year to 107 million units.  (more…)

The scope of BI solution is pretty broad and includes reporting, dashboards, advanced query and analysis, data integration and data quality, as well as a number of analytic applications such as planning and budgeting (which fall outside of the scope of BI, but are natural extensions). With limited IT resources, small IT budgets and typically a difficulty for the operational and executive staff to take on multiple new initiatives simultaneously, how should SME customers take on BI projects? (more…)

Most small and medium businesses (SMBs) can relate to Albert Einstein’s famous quote that “Information is not knowledge.” Many SMBs have plenty of data, but find it challenging to get the insights from it that they need to run their businesses more effectively and efficiently.

Businesses have always needed the ability to track and measure critical success metrics in a quantifiable way. The problem is that when there’s too much information, people find it difficult to fully comprehend it and make decisions. In fact, more than one- (more…)

Business intelligence can be an enabler for performance improvement across multiple areas of a Healthcare business. In this article I will focus on revenue cycle management.

While cost of delivering care continues to rise, getting reimbursement from patients and insurance companies is getting more difficult for doctors and hospitals. Complex coding and billing requirements, combined with reluctance of patients to pay their portion of healthcare costs is increasing the number of (more…)

A colleague and I were recently discussing a report by McKinsey Global Institute titled “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity”. I said I was surprised that it only mentions data quality once in the entire 143 pages. My colleague said it is meant to show executives the business value of the massive amounts of data being collected, and executives generally at best give data quality lip service.

I have to admit I got a little upset and got on my soapbox about how information integrity was the foundation for getting business value from data. I used the spreadsheet example to validate my point of view that executives should care about information integrity.

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Many companies are using spreadsheets in their revenue recognition and reporting process, despite the fact that they acknowledge the risks associated with the use of spreadsheets such as data and calculation errors, lack of security and control, and lack of auditing. I find this troubling because spreadsheet risks
violate basic compliance principles and revenue accounting problems are one of the leading causes of financial restatements.

Part of the problem is the fact that most organizations don’t have a single source of clean revenue data. BI can help companies consolidate and validate revenue data across multiple sources such as ERP & CRM modules, billing systems, order management systems, project management systems, and price books.

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Location has always been part business intelligence. You want to see sales by product by region. Then drill down to country, state or city. What’s new is the way location is visualized by overlaying the BI numbers onto geospatial maps.

Maps provide an intuitive visualization that aids in the communication of information about behavior and events based on where the objects or individuals are (more…)