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Monthly Archives: November 2018

Leapfrogging Opportunities For Women In Tech: The Grace Hopper Celebration

November 30, 2018   SAP
 Leapfrogging Opportunities For Women In Tech: The Grace Hopper Celebration

The annual Grace Hopper conference is the place to be for women in technology. It’s an amazing platform for female technologists to exchange insights and network. Grace Hopper, also known as “Amazing Grace,” is considered to be the first modern programmer in the early 1950s. Her motto: “If it’s a good idea, just do it. It’s much easier to apologize afterward than to get approval before.”

To honor Hopper’s achievements, Anita Borg, who holds a Ph.D. in computer sciences, founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) in 1984, and the “Systers” online community in 1987. Created for women technologists in computing, the “Syster” community strives to increase the number of women in computer sciences and improve the work environment for women.

“The career choices for women are still anything but cliché-free. To encourage more women to enter the IT field, we need to have more female ambassadors and mentors who share their own experience of how they ventured out to work in IT and succeeded. It’s a way to help women envision their future in technology,” said Dilipkumar Khandelwal, president of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and managing director of SAP Labs India, a strong supporter of women in technology.

This year, three ambassadors from the SAP Application Innovation Services (AIS) department attended the annual GHC event in Texas: Bärbel Haenelt, Gabriele Weyerhaeuser, and Julia Siebeck. Julia and Bärbel were also selected by AnitaB.org to be a speaker at the event.

The importance of women in tech

The annual GHC aims to pique women’s interest in STEM subjects and encourage them to work for tech organizations. Encouraging women to pursue a career in IT is more important than ever, according to this year’s OECD report, “Empowering Women in the Digital Age.” New digital tools support and empower inclusive global economic growth. To seize this opportunity, it is essential that no one, and especially no woman, is held back in trying to achieve their aspirations. Based on the report, companies can take advantage of digital transformation as a leapfrog opportunity for women and a chance to build a more inclusive digital world overall.

The change includes breaking stereotypes in early education that represent hurdles for a more inclusive workforce in IT later on. When Julia was in grammar school, she had to defend her place as one of the best mathematics students in her class. Gabriele shared a similar experience: “My teacher once said that it cannot be possible that there are girls in sciences and mathematics classes at school. He even asked us why we girls didn’t attend language class.”

Today, 250 million fewer women than men are online globally. Women living in developing countries, including Sub-Saharan Africa and rural parts of Asia, face even greater career barriers due to limited technology access. This leads to a systematic under-representation of women in information and communication technology (ICT) jobs as well as top management and academic careers.

Women worldwide are 20 percent less likely to hold a senior leadership position in the mobile communication industry, and they comprise only 8 percent of the investing partners at the top 100 venture capital (VC) firms.  Events like GHC help women to clear these hurdles by networking with other women and gaining encouragement to pursue careers in IT.

Speed-dating with mentoring

Companies from all over the world offered activities at GHC to help women build successful IT careers, including a demo booth to pitch ideas, workshops, and keynotes on opportunities women face in the digital transformation era. For example, Disney offered a fun but profound presentation on how Minnie Mouse would appear today. “The presentation showed Minnie Mouse with nerdy glasses and laptop—a completely different appearance than what we were used to in our times,” said Bärbel.

The mentoring circle was one of the highlights for both students and recent graduates, offering a perfect way to gain insights about onsite companies and their working environments. Fifty tables were set up in a huge room, allowing students to pick different topics. “It was a little bit like speed-dating,” said Bärbel, with a twinkle in her eye.

Julia was surprised to learn that today’s graduates have a very clear picture in mind when looking for a job. “They choose their employer very carefully and ask specific questions on diversity and career,” she noted. “For sure, work-life balance goes without saying. Mentoring was about sharing valuable tips that help propel the IT career of young talents forward.”

For women seeking to enter or advance their career in, GHC is more than just an event to connect and get a one-time career advice; it’s a stepping stone to build a lasting network. It is also a talent pool. “Particularly remarkable is the “embracing atmosphere” at the event,” said Gabriele. “Attendees are open-minded and energizing. It’s a true platform for hungry talents and more senior professionals to connect and empower women to get greater access to more senior-level career opportunities.”

GHC is a leapfrog opportunity for women’s economic empowerment to accelerate progress in the digital transformation and the digital labor market.

For more on this topic, see “Women In Leadership: Don’t Ring The Bell Yet.”

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AI Weekly: 6 important machine learning developments from AWS re:Invent

November 30, 2018   Big Data

This week in Las Vegas, Amazon rolled out dozens of new features, upgrades, and new products at AWS re:Invent. Here’s a quick roundup of news out of the annual conference that may matter to members of the AI community.

Inference, instances, and making GPUs more efficient

A disproportionate amount of money is spent on inference versus training when it comes to AI models, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said, and GPUs can be terribly inefficient.

To address these issues, Amazon custom-designed a chip named Inferentia due out next year and created Elastic Inference, a service that identifies parts of a neural network that can benefit from acceleration.

To speed up training of AI models, Amazon introduced AWS-Optimized TensorFlow, which can train a model with the ResNet-50 benchmark in 14 minutes.

Also announced to rev up AI: P3dn GPU instances. With eight Nvidia V100 GPUs and 100 GBPS networking throughput, the instances are the most powerful cloud processing for ML available today, according to Amazon.

Data lakes

Also this week: Amazon launched AWS Lake Formation to help businesses create data lakes in a matter of days instead of weeks. Data lakes are a way to store data in a single storage repository; breaking down data silos can help data scientists and engineers discover insights across an organization.

Other data services introduced that may be of importance to people in the AI community include Ground Station, for transmitting data to and from satellites, as well as AWS Control Tower and AWS Security Hub for data management.

Make AI like AWS

All these services and ways to make and enhance AI models don’t do a hell of a lot of good if you don’t know what you’re doing, so this week Amazon made available the training it provides for its own employees.

In total, there are 30 courses available, and videos are sorted for roles like business decision maker, developer, or data scientist.

Machine learning marketplace for developers to sell ML models

A marketplace is now open for developers to buy and sell machine learning models. This follows such marketplaces being made by companies like Algorithmia and Nuance, as well as resources like the AI Hub from Google, which is coming soon.

“This is a huge changer not just for consumers of machine learning algorithms, but also for the sellers who want to get more money or usage out of what they’re doing,” CEO Andy Jassy said onstage during the conference.

The AWS Marketplace for ML and AI models was made available for the first time this week and launched with 150 models.

DeepRacer and reinforcement learning

Amazon also debuted DeepRacer, a $ 399 miniature car driven with reinforcement learning models as well as the DeepRacer League, a competition that will take place online and at AWS events throughout 2019 with $ 399 miniature cars.

Models are trained in SageMaker RL, a virtual environment from AWS that also made its debut this week.

Other SageMaker debuts this week include SageMaker Ground Truth for the automation of data labeling and SageMaker Neo for deploying AI in the cloud or on the edge. Amazon says Neo makes it possible to run models twice as quickly with a reduced memory footprint.

RoboMaker

To start out the week, Amazon introduced RoboMaker, a service that helps developers build and deploy robotics applications. Sample applications and simulations are also available from the new service. RoboMaker works on top of Robot Operating System (ROS). The premiere of RoboMaker follows Microsoft’s robotics integration with Windows 10 in September.

So that’s it for re:Invent. Be sure to follow VentureBeat next week as the AI community convenes at the NeurIPS conference in Montreal. If you’re heading that way, read Kyle Wiggers’ roundup of what’s ahead at the conference.

For AI coverage, send news tips to Khari Johnson and Kyle Wiggers — and be sure to bookmark our AI Channel.

Khari Johnson

AI Staff Writer

P.S. Please enjoy this short film about the perils of ambient computing and L1ZY, an AI-powered speaker that terrorizes a family.

From VB

 AI Weekly: 6 important machine learning developments from AWS re:Invent

DHL will invest $ 300 million to quadruple robots in warehouses in 2019

Contract logistics provider DHL Supply Chain will spend $ 300 million in 2019 to quadruple the amount of tech in its warehouses like robots and IoT sensors.

Microsoft’s Surface roadmap reportedly includes ambient computing and a modular all-in-one PC

Microsoft’s hardware roadmap: refreshed Surface Pro and Surface Book, cheap Xbox One S, ambient computing device, Andromeda foldable tablet, and modular PC.

Qualcomm Ventures launches $ 100 million AI fund

Qualcomm Ventures plans to invest up to $ 100 million in companies creating novel AI solutions across a range of verticals.

 AI Weekly: 6 important machine learning developments from AWS re:Invent

Amazon unveils AWS Inferentia chip for AI deployment

Inferentia is a chip designed by AWS due out next year. The chip will work with Elastic Inferences, another service made to speed the deployment of AI.

Volvo and Luminar demo advanced lidar tech that gives autonomous cars detailed view of pedestrian movements

Volvo and Luminar gave a glimpse into the future of autonomous cars at the Automobility LA trade show today, as the duo demoed advanced lidar technology.

 AI Weekly: 6 important machine learning developments from AWS re:Invent

What Moxi the robot is learning from nurses in Texas

Reduction of nurse burnout is the primary mission of Moxi, a nurse assistant robot with social intelligence that started trials at hospitals in Texas in September.

 AI Weekly: 6 important machine learning developments from AWS re:Invent

Amazon Echo or Google Home: Which smart speaker is right for you?

Many of the places where Google Assistant and Alexa meet come to a draw. Consider these features when deciding between Google Home and Amazon Echo.

Beyond VB

Why AI needs to reflect society

While artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to solve an incredible spectrum of problems and challenges in our lives, our work and our world, there is a widening disconnect between the people who are introducing and deploying AI-based solutions and those who set policies for when and how these solutions are used. (via Forbes)

World-renowned AI experts duke it out on Twitter

A pair of AI experts have been trading shots on Twitter in a friendly (yet entertainingly competitive) debate concerning the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the past week or so. (via The Next Web)

New fastMRI open source AI research tools from Facebook and NYU School of Medicine

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and NYU School of Medicine’s Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI²R) are sharing new open source tools and data as part of fastMRI, a joint research project to spur development of AI systems to speed MRI scans by up to 10x. (via Facebook)

How cheap labor drives China’s AI ambitions 

Some of the most critical work in advancing China’s technology goals takes place in a former cement factory in the middle of the country’s heartland, far from the aspiring Silicon Valleys of Beijing and Shenzhen. (via New York Times)

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Salesforce's Earnings Mystery

November 30, 2018   CRM News and Info

My only question about Salesforce’s recent revenue announcement is why the company described the vast majority of its nonprofessional services revenues as “subscription and support.” Proserv revenues were appropriately small, at US$ 224 million, while subscription and support was $ 3.17 billion, or 26 percent more than the same quarter a year earlier. Nice going, by the way.

Salesforce growth is seemingly nonstop, and the company raised guidance to $ 16 billion at the high end of its range for the next fiscal year, 2020. Fast growing, big, capturing lots of revenue and probably much of the oxygen in the CRM room — I get that. Still, why subscription and support, as if they were distinct?

Hinting at Consolidation?

The whole premise of Software as a Service, or subscription software, always has been that everything is rolled up into one price, including the service itself, a modicum of support, maintenance, enhancements, and the infrastructure that runs it all.

Maybe the answer has been there all along and I have missed it — or maybe Salesforce’s labeling reflects some subtle changes that are going on at Oracle.

A couple of quarters ago, Oracle merged its revenue categories into one hairball, obscuring the fact that the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) number was a lot smaller than the SaaS and platform numbers. I’ve maintained the company did that because it didn’t have the fully deployed cloud data centers it needed to be more aggressive in the market.

That’s changing, though. An Oracle cloud data center is no small thing. It’s complex and expensive — full of redundancy, failover, high bandwidth and such — and Oracle has been deploying data centers as quickly as possible.

Other vendors, Salesforce included, have partnered with infrastructure providers like Amazon. Its AWS service can host Salesforce — especially in foreign markets, as the company spreads its wings and bows to international pressure to place data centers near or in the country where the data originates.

Oracle won’t do that for lots of reasons, such as its bid for all the marbles in the Defense Department’s billion dollar JEDI procurement. It wouldn’t do for Oracle to rely on AWS in its private business but insist on vertical integration inside DoD.

In the private sector, Oracle faces the same challenge as Salesforce, but as its legacy base already has data in-country, many customers expect more or less the same treatment. Without the legacy, Salesforce customers have made a different calculus. Oracle also has an apparent strong desire to capture revenue from hosting legacy apps that don’t convert to new cloud apps, which makes sense.

So why did Salesforce report subscription and support revenues? It might just be a nod to Wall Street, a way to predigest the numbers to enable financial analysts to compare apples more easily. If so, it’s a sign of how the industry is consolidating, with nods to both past and future.

The Evolving Software Utility

By my count, Salesforce has about a dozen clouds. Some, like the Sales Cloud, generate well in excess of one billion dollars each. The average cloud revenue is now a billion and counting. That’s an enormous achievement, but what’s next?

As they say on Wall Street, trees don’t grow to the moon. There are always natural checks and balances on growth. A market matures or just runs out of fresh customers, for instance. That could happen with Salesforce, though that eventuality seems well off in the future.

The company has future-proofed itself to a high degree by enlisting the help of so many partners — first in the AppExchange and now in vertical markets. Also, products like Mulesoft, the Integration Cloud, still did independent business last time I checked.

Salesforce also is carefully stepping out but not away from CRM with its emphasis on all purpose application development. In that scenario, CRM has become the biggest and most successful demonstration project, and there’s more blue-sky opportunity in app development than there is even in CRM, as new apps in fields like healthcare show.

Salesforce has been architected for growth from the get-go, and its business model has few of the lurking pitfalls of earlier generations of software companies. This might represent the end game of software. We will never again be able to live without software, but it is becoming ubiquitous, embedded so deeply in modern life that everyone depends on it. When that happens, you’ve crossed over from a business to a utility.

It’s not just Salesforce that’s going this way. Other companies that make up parts of the evolving software utility include Oracle, whose hardware and autonomous database are used throughout the industry, social media vendors like Facebook and Twitter, search providers like Google, and many others.

In light of the negative news coverage companies like Facebook have experienced lately, it’s reasonable that behind the scenes more mature vendors are beginning to lean on the younger players to clean up their acts for the good of the industry.

We’re already seeing people like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
compare Facebook to cigarettes and nicotine addiction.

With $ 16 billion in forward-looking revenues in his corner, when Benioff speaks, the whole industry has to pay attention.
end enn Salesforce's Earnings Mystery

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.


Denis%20Pombriant Salesforce's Earnings Mystery
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.

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AI and Machine Learning Inside and Out in Spotfire X

November 30, 2018   TIBCO Spotfire

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning are quickly moving beyond the hype, and into real business process and practice. Increasingly, recommender systems in analytics software sift out undesired choices, anomaly detectors alert investigators of likely incidents, and propensity models capture potential buyers for campaign targeting.

TIBCO Spotfire has technology that spans all the way from predictive models to dynamic visual dashboards, so it has always been the top choice for developing AI applications. Once data is made available via the Spotfire connectors, the next step is to start building a visual workflow. However, as datasets grow wider and taller, finding insightful combinations of variables becomes like searching for needles in a haystack. This is why we have added AI-powered suggestions throughout Spotfire X: to ease the burden of hunting through your data by trial and error.

These new AI driven algorithms in Spotfire X operate as you use the product and help focus your journey towards data discoveries. The algorithms automatically inform your choices along the way, while still leaving you free to decide how to develop your analysis.

Using this new AI functionality is pretty straightforward. In the new Spotfire X data panel, you simply select a variable of interest and this sets the algorithms in motion. The robust and scalable algorithms will automatically find the top related variables, including those that interact with each other, to affect your chosen variable.

Screen Shot 2018 11 27 at 2.13.32 PM 2 AI and Machine Learning Inside and Out in Spotfire X

Even better, these algorithms are integrated into Spotfire X’s new natural language query feature. Thus, another way to start finding relationships is by simply asking a question about a variable. Once relationships are identified, Spotfire X automatically recommends one or more visualizations that depict those relationships. You can pick and choose the visualizations that most resonate with your goals and easily add them to your dashboard. After that, you have all the convenience and power of Spotfire X’s visualization, dashboarding and advanced curation features at your disposal in order to design and deploy your visual workflows to your audience.

To learn more about how the new Spotfire X AI-powered insights work watch the webinar, AI and TIBCO Spotfire X: Inside and Out, and try out a 30-day free trial of Spotfire X.

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after false alarms and dashed hopes, maybe there's “ironclad proof” of Russian collusion

November 30, 2018   Humor
 after false alarms and dashed hopes, maybe there's ironclad proof of Russian collusion


It’s not so much the lies themselves as much as Paul Manafort’s lies confirmed by inference or by triangulation the existence of those rigged witches.

x

The biggest news here isn’t that Trump criminally tampered with Manafort as a witness but that Mueller thinks he has ironclad proof of Trump’s collusion with Russia. Checkmate.https://t.co/VUlwpETXmX

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) November 27, 2018

Striking a plea deal with Mr. Manafort in September potentially gave prosecutors access to information that could prove useful to their investigation. But their filing on Monday, a rare step in a plea deal, suggested that they thought Mr. Manafort was withholding details that could be pertinent to the Russia inquiry or other cases.

The question of whether Mr. Trump might pardon Mr. Manafort for his crimes has loomed over his case since he was first indicted a year ago and has lingered as a possibility. A former lawyer for Mr. Trump broached the prospect of a pardon with one of Mr. Manafort’s lawyers last year, raising questions about whether he was trying to influence Mr. Manafort’s decision about whether to cooperate with investigators.

The filing Monday suggested that prosecutors do not consider Mr. Manafort a credible witness. Even if he has provided information that helps them develop criminal cases, by asserting that he repeatedly lied, they could hardly call him to testify.

[…]

“Everybody who lies to Mueller gets called on it — so he had to know that Mueller would catch him. So the question is: What was he hiding that is worse than going to jail for the rest of your life?” said Joyce Vance, a professor of law at the University of Alabama law school and former federal prosecutor. “There are often rocky dealings with a cooperator, and Mueller didn’t cut bait at the first sign of trouble. It was likely more than one lie and this would not have been a minor detail — it had to be something material and significant and intentional.”

www.nytimes.com/…

x

NO COLLUSION – RIGGED WITCH HUNT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018

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DHL will invest $300 million to quadruple robots in warehouses in 2019

November 30, 2018   Big Data

DHL Supply Chain, a logistics division of DHL, today announced it will invest $ 300 million to modernize 60 percent of its warehouses in North America with more IoT sensors and robots. Robotic process automation, and software made to reduce workflow interruptions will also play a role.

Such technology is already in operation in 85 DHL facilities, or roughly 20 percent of warehouses across North America. Funding announced today will bring emerging technology to 350 of DHL Supply Chain’s 430 operating sites. The company has more than 35,000 employees in North America.

Robots from companies like Locus Robotics that were made to collaborate with humans to fulfill orders are currently being used in some of DHL’s more modern facilities, but no specific vendor or company has been selected to supply robots as part of the new initiative, DHL Supply Chain North America CEO Scott Sureddin told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

Conversations are ongoing with more than 25 robotics and process automation industry leaders, DHL Supply Chain president of retail Jim Gehr said. DHL Supply Chain warehouse robots will work primarily with unit picking operations and will be able to complete a range of tasks, from collaborative piece picking, to shuttling items from one side of a factory to another, to following human packers.

“With collaborative robots, we have seen increases in picking productivity by over 100 percent increase, and those are gains we had not seen in the prior decade,” Gehr said.

A DHL Supply Chain innovation center for research and exploration of ideas surrounding the future of the supply chain industry is scheduled to open outside Chicago in September 2019 and will compliment existing innovation centers in Europe and Asia. The new center will work with its counterparts in other parts of the world, but robot trials will continue to take place inside facilities in operation today.

“When it’s time to do a pilot, we really have to do that on the operating floor out there in a warehouse so we can kind of report back, share our different findings with them, and then they can pick and choose what they want to display in the innovation center for customers and things like that,” Gehr said.

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Transforming Customer Insights Into Actionable Intelligence

November 29, 2018   CRM News and Info

From technology innovation to the workplace, the business landscape has been evolving rapidly, and companies now are tasked with adapting to fast change in a world of ongoing digital transformation.

However, there is one element that will remain a constant requirement for success: meeting the needs of customers and delivering a quality experience.

Nurturing customer relationships always has and always will be fundamental for company success. However, as the world becomes increasingly connected and more communications become instant, it arguably is more vital now than ever before.

Platforms such as social media and review sites offer customers the ability to voice their experiences to a global audience anywhere and at any time.

The Power of the Customer

While these global online channels pose huge advantages for brands receiving positive messages from customers about their service, they can prove hugely detrimental for those recognized for delivering a poor experience.

With messages now able to reach thousands of people around the world within moments, consumers can be some of the most influential brand ambassadors. Accounts of their experiences can reach a wealth of potential new customers and often can influence the decision-making process of others.

Around half of shoppers
would try a new brand based on reviews (57 percent) or word of mouth (46 percent) alone, recent research suggests.

What’s more, consumer loyalty inevitably has been depreciating at the hands of technology and greater demand for fast and convenient exchanges. All too often, we see brands — particularly across the retail sector — face significant backlash from customers unhappy with the level of service and communication provided.

Companies that neglect the development of customer relationships at the very early stages risk losing customers before connections can be fully established.

Taking Action on Customer Insights

With competition growing in almost every industry worldwide, businesses need to take action to understand the standpoint of their customers better, and to use the insights gathered from those relationships to adapt and enhance the delivery of their future services.

Those on the receiving end ultimately are very well placed to expose common pain points and weaknesses in a product or service, offering businesses deeper insights into trends influencing the behavior and needs of those they ultimately want to reach.

Enabling greater interactions between staff and consumers can be extremely valuable in finding new ways to improve a business. However, decision makers must ensure they have the tools in place to give customers a voice, and then use them to evaluate their business and drive it forward.

Good reporting on customer relationships is therefore pivotal to a company’s performance strategy. As technology progresses, so should a company’s ability to drive success and efficiency through better customer insights.

Many successful businesses no longer view customer relationship management software as a way to gather customer information. They now see it as a productivity tool — a way to connect with customers intelligently — and, more crucially, a means to achieving better customer service success.

The value that these systems provide to businesses around the world is evident. CRM became the largest software market in 2017, according to Gartner, and it is tipped to see a further 16 percent growth by the end of this year.

The insights captured and stored within these tools are key to building a 360-degree view of customers in an ever growing pool of potential targets. However, the onboarding process of software-based solutions can prove challenging, particularly when it comes to traditional sales reps who often view these systems as tedious and unnecessary.

However, even the most diehard “pen and paper” sales people can be converted with the right piece of technology — one that helps them simplify their everyday tasks and improve performance.

By providing employees with the solutions needed to establish and foster customer relationships in a fast-paced environment, decision makers can ensure that they lead from the front to help turn customer insights into intelligence, and to enhance their service delivery and kickstart business growth.

Overcoming the Hurdles

Although it is clear that a greater investment in listening and learning from customers is important for success in the digital age, there are still some challenges that can arise when companies attempt to harness and apply this intelligence most effectively.

For example, with companies able to reach customers across a range of platforms and touchpoints, the pool of data that can be collected and analyzed has been growing continuously, and it takes many different forms.

Once staff are instructed to use customer experiences to inform their growth strategies, many companies can dedicate huge amounts of time and resource to analyzing this data, narrowing the window to develop an actionable strategy for improvement.

Using solutions to make this process as efficient as possible will ensure that businesses can maximize the opportunity to turn customer experiences into new opportunities for growth and improvement.

The prevalence of sophisticated analytics tools, which are able to track and review various metrics of customer engagement — such as rate, duration, and sentiment across a range of digital channels and CRM systems — now offer companies a means of automating the entire process.

Companies can gather and measure their interactions with current and potential customers quickly and effectively, feeding them back into their business to fuel their sales approach.

As technology continues to evolve, and smarter ways to analyze data arise, companies should aim to digitize the management of customer relationships and open their businesses up to the power they can realize from improved services.

By treating these relationships as valuable business assets, decision makers not only can sharpen the focus of employees, enabling them to make better customer connections, but also can build an effective course of business intelligence to enhance performance in the near future and beyond.
end enn Transforming Customer Insights Into Actionable Intelligence


Michael%20FitzGerald Transforming Customer Insights Into Actionable Intelligence
Michael FitzGerald is founder and CEO of
OnePageCRM.

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THE DAILY CHORTLE

November 29, 2018   Humor

visit evilmilk.com

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

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Shopping Cart for Dynamics CRM Portal with Payment Gateway

November 29, 2018   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
CRM Blog Shopping Cart for Dynamics CRM Portal with Payment Gateway

Offer products and services from any CRM entity for your clients to purchase from CRM Portal using Dynamics Shopping Cart module. Add items to basket, and proceed to Checkout for payment. Solution includes:

CRM Shopping Cart Configuration Wizard (FREE) – Step by step Wizard to configure Dynamics CRM portal to display products or services as shopping list, view prices and product’s details read from CRM, and download product’s related documentation.

Credit Card Payment Gateway – your client can now pay with credit card for products and services purchased online.

When purchasing process is completed two new records are created in CRM:
Payment record – stores the client’s details.
Basket record – stores the item purchased online.

Download Trial Version and FREE (no strings attached) Portal Store – Configuration Wizard

http://www.dynamicsobjects.com/Our-Solutions/Shopping-Cart-for-CRM-Portal

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2020 Procurement: What’s Your Source-To-Contract Strategy?

November 29, 2018   BI News and Info
 2020 Procurement: What’s Your Source To Contract Strategy?

Digital transformation has the power to turn procurement into a critical change agent over the next couple of years. Yet, as I discussed in my last blog on spend analysis, procurement executives have been hesitant to fully participate in the digitalization happening all around them throughout the enterprise, despite the benefits they can achieve.

Take a look at this statistic from The Hackett Group study “The CPO Agenda: Expanding Procurement’s Influence Through Change and Innovation.” A full 95% of the executives surveyed believe that digital transformation will fundamentally change the way procurement services are delivered within the next two years. Yet these CPOs are worried that shifting to a digital model will increase risks in areas such as cybersecurity, access to talent, intensified competition, regulatory compliance, and disruptive innovation.

Those are all valid concerns, but standing still from a business transformation perspective won’t prevent those challenges from happening. In fact, continuing to use old legacy systems and processes may even open up organizations to more risk.

Consider an integrated approach to reduce risk

It is time for CPOs to recognize that transitioning their procurement to a single, cloud-based integrated suite can, in fact, help them improve margins, reduce costs, and manage risks. And it could even be an enabler of business innovation – and the very digitalization they have wanted to avoid – in other parts of their organizations.

One thing is clear: the old way of managing procurement just doesn’t work anymore. Organizations have typically adopted one application, such as spend analysis, then sourcing, and finally contracts, as the need and readiness arises. A step-by-step approach is certainly not a bad one unless the solutions are from three different vendors. Unfortunately, this is a pretty typical scenario that results in disparate systems that most likely don’t talk to each other. Not only is this a major challenge for the procurement people who are diligently trying to increase efficiencies, but in the end, companies often experience poor performance and higher costs.

Ready procurement for the future

In “Understanding Integrated Suites: The Example of E-Sourcing,” The Hackett Group identified a “hot topic in procurement” embraced by organizations that have made digital transformation part of their 2020 strategy. You probably aren’t surprised to hear that the topic is the trend of deploying integrated suites.

The group’s research shows that many organizations are moving toward a single, cloud-based suite that integrates functionality across both source-to-contract and purchase-to-pay processes. To get started, these enterprises often choose one functional area first, such as source to contract, which includes automated spend analysis, sourcing, and contract management.

With this approach, organizations are improving spend under management, increasing sourcing productivity, and improving process efficiency across spend categories, to name just a few. The shift to an integrated solution can also have a big bottom-line impact, as well, as a recent McKinsey report discovered. The report, “A Road Map for Digitizing Source-to-Pay,” noted that by automating not only source-to-contract processes, but the entire source-to-pay cycle, a company could reduce its spend by up to 3.5%. Imagine the significant impact that would have for companies that have annual spend in the millions.

Achieving cost savings across the globe

Global companies in almost every industry are finding they can achieve substantial cost savings by streamlining business processes, improving efficiencies, and increasing productivity. For instance, one multibillion-dollar clothing retailer used an integrated procurement approach and reduced the steps in its invoice payment process by 66%. The company also simplified reporting and data analytics to help amplify its strategic growth.

A global convenience store retailer had similar results, finding that with an integrated Strategic Sourcing process, it made smarter decisions and saved money. The retailer achieved higher efficiencies due to automating manual processes, with accelerated contract-approval processes and faster contract executions.

These companies now have greater visibility and control with a more strategic and innovative approach that delivers the potential to stimulate growth and agility – while achieving financial results like the one cited in the McKinsey report.

To read more about The Hackett Group’s e-sourcing research, access the full report here. Or to discover more on the benefits of integrating your spend analysis, sourcing, and contracts management, learn about strategic sourcing here.

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