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The Tool Every Retail Banker Should Use To Serve Customers
There’s a tool owned by everyone from school children to executives. We’d like to make the case that retail bank employees can up their game and add value for their customers by using it for every interaction. What is this amazing tool? It’s your tablet.
Picture this: A customer visits your bank branch for the first time. They enter and are greeted by a friendly team member sporting a sleek tablet. Instead of asking the customer to stand in line, they ask them their name, phone number, and the reason for their visit. If the employee can’t immediately resolve the customer’s issue, they’ll point them to the person who can—no more being shuffled from line to line looking for help. Sounds easy, right?
There’s no doubt that the new normal of banking is mobile-centric. Everyone’s busy, everyone’s on the move, and everyone wants to make the most of technology, bankers and customers alike.
Mobile-centric is now
Mobile-centric is no longer the future; it’s now. There’s a reason we believe that every single retail banker should have a tablet equipped with , in their hand. Dynamics 365 better enables your team to manage their customer interactions. When they enter a name, email, phone number, and the reason for the customer’s visit to your bank, they can pull up the customer’s entire record and automatically route them to the most appropriate resources. If it is a teller transaction, they’ll direct them to the teller. If they want to open a new account, they can quickly capture the information needed for the new-account setup.
With this approach, it easier for customers to manage their financial business, and your employees have the social contact that presents an opportunity to introduce other offerings. You’ve also captured important contact information that can be used by your sales team to reach out by phone, text, or email.
Why Dynamics 365?
Without a full-service system such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, you may have a customer’s financial information in one place, and his customer profile in another. It’s hard to keep everything up to date.
But best-in-class customer service involves more than equipping staff with tablets. Matching the right technology with the right people and best practices to support the various tasks related to customer engagement is vital.
It’s also essential to put the right data in the hands of those employees focused on customer engagement. When a customer enters a branch and is greeted by an employee able to assist them with a financial transaction and also log a case around a mortgage account question, you’ve gone a long way toward earning customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Operating branches is expensive, and some banks have to close branches in an attempt to control costs and fund the spending required to continue the bank’s digital transformation. But branches are still critical customer touchpoints. Branch profitability can be re-defined if customer engagement within the branch is re-imagined.
An integrated customer engagement engine ties the physical presence of a branch and a bank’s employees with the digital relationship management tools and processes necessary for exceptional customer service.
powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers bank staff with the tools and information needed to efficiently deliver high-quality, personalized service – for all interactions across all channels. It gives managers and team members the information they need to be effective.
If you’d like to know more about digital transformation for your bank, our team of experts at Crowe, 877-600-2253 or crminfo@crowe.com.
By Crowe,
What Every Business Leader Needs to Know About Python
Reading Time: 4 minutes
In this blog, written for logistics and operations management, marketing professionals, and other business leaders, you’ll learn a bit about why a scripting language, Python, may be invaluable for your analysts and data scientists, and how it can help them to get more meaningful insights faster.
What’s Python, and why does it matter to your data analysts and data scientists—and to you?
Python is one of the world’s most popular programming languages, with wide adoption that’s growing at 27% year over year. Fueling this growth are data scientists, and the tools—many now leveraging Python—they rely on. With its rich libraries and ease of use, Python makes it easier to focus on solving problems rather than writing code. Because Python is open source, its community of users can contribute directly to making it better.
Here’s why it matters for you. Python works so well for data science and machine learning (a key to automating processes and insights) in part because it can rapidly scale up or down, making it possible to quickly build, test, and iterate models. This enables data scientists to iterate for insights faster, and to build out predictive (“what will happen”) and prescriptive (“what would be best to happen”) analytics. These insights are the highest value use cases of analytics for the business, but they are also the most difficult insights to gain.
Faster insights lead to innovation and competitive advantage
In the following two examples, learn how the right tooling—including Python capability—provided data analysts and data scientists what they needed to accelerate time to insight and drive competitive advantage.
Anadarko, an oil and gas exploration and production company, wanted to increase value to its stakeholders by lowering operating costs and improving efficiency through new technology. According to Data Scientist Dingzhou Cao of Anadarko, “With open source, it would have taken at least 10 to 12 months to build a similar system…[now we can] see live data coming in, and we have plug and play analytics models to process the live data and generate results. Without having to make a phone call, the drillers get the message, ‘Please act in this manner.’…We believe this is going to give us an advantage, and profit for our shareholders.” With these new enhanced, interactive models, Anadarko was able to significantly speed up time to insight, directly improving operations and benefiting the company’s stakeholders.
AA Ireland, specializing in home, motor, and travel insurance, wanted to get real-time predictions to identify the most profitable customer types, and chose to step beyond industry standard software for “something that was powerful and future-proof,” said Colm Carey, Chief Analytics Officer. “You don’t sit in an IT queue for a year and a half. You build a model yourself and generate a lot of revenue for the company. It’s that power.” As Carey noted, “Insurance has always had predictive models, but we would build something, and in three months, update it. [Now] data comes in and goes out to models seamlessly without disruption, basically providing real-time predictability.” Accelerating the building of these predictive models allowed analysts to think in real time and increase company profits.
In both cases, combining advanced visual analytics with Python expressions and data science drove faster, more insightful decision models. Increasing the agility of their data analytics and data science teams was key to getting insights and business benefits faster.
Build a framework with your data science teams to optimize and innovate
When business leaders seek insights through data analytics and data science, a shared understanding across teams is necessary for insights and innovation to arise. Orchestrating data science, IT operations, and business operations to go beyond information into transformation requires:
- A regular cadence of communication
- A shared understanding of high-value business goals
- A culture that welcomes experimentation
Ask your data scientists what they need to slash time to insights, and what obstacles they face in helping your business outperform and outcompete. Listen to their perspective and challenge them to help you find the highest value insights—those that can make the impossible possible.
And invite them to join us for a special webinar with Neil Kanungo, Data Scientist at TIBCO, as he shares how data scientists can use the power of Python and its open-source libraries to speed time to insights, walking through the setup, execution, and governance of Python for advanced analytics needs.
The Importance of Customer Service Spans Across Every Industry
Regardless of industry, most businesses – including many of our own clients – are focused on enhancing the customer experience they deliver. Indeed, it comes as no surprise that improving customer service is consistently identified as a key priority in every industry we serve.
The reason is as simple as it is obvious: customer expectations have skyrocketed in recent years. Because a person can get same-day delivery on millions of products ordered on the internet, customers of all industries are demanding equivalently excellent service. Fortunately, the available technology to meet those demands is evolving in lockstep with escalating consumer expectations.
So, what are the new expectation consumers are demanding?
- More speed! Customers now expect basic service requests to be completed in real-time.
- More convenience! This includes technology solutions like bots, chats, apps, and more.
- More accuracy! To deliver here, businesses must collect, securely store, and immediately recall all data related to each customer.
- More familiarity! The baseline is recognizing a customer on the telephone within the first few seconds of a call – differentiation comes in the form of having real-time access to each customer’s past purchases and requests for service.
To mitigate the risk of losing a customer to an industry competitor offering speed, convenience, accuracy, and familiarity, businesses are searching for future-ready, omni-channel customer experience technology solutions – and a perfect example is. Dynamics 365 delivers innovation, enabling organizations to differentiate themselves in the eyes of their customers. Let’s look at a few examples across various industries:
- require real-time access to technology changes and updates in order to be able to deliver adaptability on oil rigs. “Time is money” applies to all industries, of course, but perhaps to none more so than oil and gas: every minute a rig is down is costing the company and its customers money. Enter Dynamics 365 for Field Service. This solution ensures real-time access to the information needed to keep rigs running with little to no downtime. Down the line, that means lower prices and ultimately a better customer experience.
- are using self-service portals ( a component of Dynamics 365) to gain real-time insight into available inventory. These portals are so easy to use that they are changing this industry for the better when it comes to convenience – for employees, distribution vendors, and consumers alike.
- rely on customer engagement to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, as well as new products and service offerings. This has a direct impact on the company’s bottom line. Dynamics 365 offers a solution where all customer information is available in real-time in a centralized database; it delivers efficient and reliable lead management and automates the marketing process; it empowers field workers with mobile capabilities; and it streamlines the process for acquiring and analyzing feedback from customers, which leads directly to the enablement of excellent, real-time service delivery.
Please read our to continue exploring how Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Business Applications are changing the way businesses across all industries are meeting extraordinary customer demands and delivering a consistently excellent consumer experience.
By PowerObjects,
4 Important CRM Dashboards Every Banker Needs
Our goal is to help banks make better decisions, streamline operations, manage data and information more effectively, and ultimately build a better bottom line.
After working with 1,800 financial services organizations across the country, including more than two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. banks we know they all want fast, efficient access to data. Based on all their feedback, here are four dashboards we feel every banker, and their teams, should have in order to be more productive:
1) Branch Scorecard Dashboard
The Branch Scorecard dashboard offers a quick and concise ways to measure KPI’s (key performance indicators) and gives a clear indication of how well the branch is working to achieve their targets.
Keeping a pulse on the number of accounts opened or closed in a given time period can help indicate what campaigns might be driving new account openings, or conversely which competitor campaigns are driving closed accounts.
Deposits remain the cornerstone of retail banking and while it’s important to focus on a bank’s overall deposit growth, it’s more important to focus on the deposit performance of individual branches. And measuring against goals gets at the heart of a branch’s viability.
Tracking expenses and income against an operating budget provides a way to track financial goals that provide an insightful measure of a bank’s overall efficiency.
Being able to quickly see the breakdown of products and services within a branch can help identify additional referral opportunities and highlight a branch’s ability to grow deposits within its existing branch.
2) Retail and Commercial Overview
A lot of banks talk in terms of a credit culture, but not necessarily a deposit culture. A deposit culture is just as important. It emphasizes sales leadership, sales governance, measurement against sales and marketing goals.
A sales overview dashboard provides the closed loop marketing insights needed to measure the effectiveness of each marketing campaign, from campaign –> leads generated –> pipeline impact –> revenue generated.
3) Retail CSR Dashboard
A Customer Service Representative (CSR) dashboard can be a “cockpit” for a bank representative, providing information in an easy and accessible way. A segmented list of the activities requiring my attention helps keep things organized and prioritized. Having a calendar gives me the ability to determine availability and quickly schedule new activities for myself or others.
4) Customer Account Overview
If customer information is scattered across different bank systems it will be difficult to get a clear picture of a customer and their lifecycle across products and services. Banks need to move from siloed customer data to an integrated, single view of the customer. After all, the customer is the bank’s most important asset and the bank needs to maximize the value of its relationships.
A consolidated customer profile opens up new opportunities to strengthen a bank’s customer relationships. It can include increased efficiency for customer services representatives, better risk assessment leading to quicker and more accurate lending decisions and more targeted marketing offers and more effective cross-selling activities.
Crowe CRM for Banking
Your bank can get all of these dashboards, any many more, in .
Crowe CRM for Banking empowers bank staff with the tools and information needed to efficiently deliver high-quality, personalized service – for all interactions across all channels. It gives managers and team members the information they need to be effective.
For more information, contact us at crminfo@crowe.com.
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner,
The 5 Tools Every Email Marketer Needs to Succeed
Katelyn Merendino, AMO Marketing, Retail and Bronto
Email has been around for a while, but it’s still king of the marketing world. For every $ 1 spent, email marketing generates $ 44 in ROI.
Today’s consumers expect relevant, personalized engagement from the businesses they choose to interact with. If you’re relying on “batch-and-blast messages,” you’re likely missing out on opportunities to capture your audience’s interest—and consequently, to drive more revenue.
Here are five tools that’ll help take your email marketing program to the next level.
Grow Your Lists with a Pop-Up Manager
Until someone signs up for your emails, you’re limited in the marketing messages you’re able to send to them. Contacts who aren’t subscribers can only be sent transactional emails and most email marketers believe marketing messages in a transactional email should be limited to 20% of the content. While you can encourage people to subscribe at checkout or through a transactional email, those options won’t capture website visitors who don’t convert. For this, you need to consider using a pop-up.
Pop-ups are one of the easiest and fastest ways to accelerate list growth. For example, The Duck Store, the University of Oregon’s book store, increased its subscriber base 71% in just one year using pop ups. All the potential subscriber needs to provide is their email address, so the barrier to entry is low. Yet, having that single piece of information lets you start delivering relevant messages. A pop-up management tool that allows you to control the look, feel, timing and placement of your pop-ups—and deploy different versions on desktop versus mobile—is key to providing value to the customer. With a well-customized pop-up, you can offer incentives, share content or provide information on current sales or upcoming events, all while gathering subscribers.
Recover Lost Revenue with Cart Abandonment Messages
Cart abandonment messages are vital to the bottom line. Forrester Research estimates that up to 87% of consumers abandon their carts, resulting in $ 18 billion of lost revenue annually. However, by automating email sends after a shopper leaves something in their cart, you can quickly, easily and economically bring in some of this outstanding revenue.
Turning abandoned carts into sales is most effective with a tool that can identify abandoned carts in near real time and respond to these shoppers by dynamically inserting cart information into messages.
Convert Online Window Shoppers with Browse Abandonment Messages
How many times have you browsed a site without making a purchase? Probably more than you can count! According to the Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly Report, Q1 2018, more than 95% of visitors leave your site without converting, but triggered browse recovery messages can nudge them to return.
Many businesses worry that automating these emails will be viewed as intrusive or increase unsubscribe rates, but times have changed. Ninety-one percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember and provide relevant offers—in other words, brands that convey value directly to each customer. To ensure a personalized experience, you need to use a browse recovery tool that allows you to configure how often customers receive messages, regulate which SKUs to highlight and capture and match page views to current or future contacts.
Drive Efficiency and Visibility with Seamless Integrations
As your business grows, using a number of stand-alone applications that each handle short-term, tactical needs creates functional silos and lowers efficiency and visibility. The ability to easily transfer data from your ERP or ecommerce platform to your email platform (and back) is important to developing a more sophisticated approach to email marketing.
If sharing information between your email marketing platform and other systems is arduous or time-consuming, it’s harder to create targeted, hyper-personalized messages. A built-in connector seamlessly syncs contact, order, product and opt-in data between all platforms, enabling you to gain deeper insight into your customers’ behaviors and send more relevant emails that drive them to engage.
Expand on Email with SMS Text Messaging
Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging is an increasingly utilized tactic among marketers now, as 98% of texts are read within two minutes and consumers are increasingly opting in to receiving text messages from brands. Sending emails and texts from a single platform allows you to reach the customers who engage most with each channel while delivering a unified, consistent user experience.
As part of your email platform, your SMS tool should enable you to display dynamic content based on list, segment, or keyword membership and expand your existing automation to include SMS campaigns within the same multi-channel workflows.
Sophisticated Email Marketing Made Easy
Enhancing your email marketing program doesn’t have to be complicated with the right tools in your arsenal. To learn how the Bronto Marketing Platform can help your business gain subscribers, grow revenue, and drive engagement, check out the on-demand webinar below that applies to your industry.
Watch these webinars to learn more about email marketing for retailers, email marketing for software companies and email marketing for nonprofits.
by NetSuite filed under
Make Every Sprint Count with DevOps Analytics
Today, most companies can say that they have integrated some DevOps collaboration between their development and operations teams. They are breaking down the silos, communicating better, and making the company more efficient as a result. But is that really true? Is your DevOps movement doing what it was set out to do?
DevOps first came about in 2007-2008 to fix problems in the software industry and bring with it continuous improvement and greater efficiencies. The idea was that to be more successful, development and operations teams that had never worked together before were now expected to share responsibilities, communicate with each other, and be transparent. Thus forming a highly performant DevOps team.
For us, as an analytical company, the word “efficiency” is what sparks our interest. If the main goal is to bring about efficiencies, shouldn’t there be some measurement available to make sure the target is being met?
Of course, there should be. And it’s called DevOps analytics.
DevOps analytics is the analysis of machine data to find insights that can be acted upon. In this case, insights that can be responded to in order to optimize a sequence or a larger process quickly. DevOps data analytics can be set up and measured at any time during your DevOps journey. Of course, the sooner you do it, the sooner you will be able to measure your successes and failures and make necessary adjustments. Every day is critical, especially in a DevOps environment where teams are working faster and more reliably.
Getting Started
Start by listing your KPIs. You should have at least one KPI for every part of your product cycle; planning, development, testing, deployment, release, and monitoring. Don’t overlook adding a few KPIs for the active cooperation between different teams (since this is the heart of the DevOps culture). Think in terms of developers working with their operations counterparts to deliver operable applications, or operations specialists monitoring applications delivered by development.
Useful KPIs should be obtainable, reviewable, and actionable—with the ‘actionable’ KPI playing a significant role in analytics for DevOps. We’ll circle back to the actionable part later on in this blog.
If you’re managing a team, you might want to consider adding usage analytics to your routine. This is an excellent way to see who is looking at their dashboards and using the data to move things forward.
With DevOps touching on so many different aspects of the entire company (teams, people, processes, etc.), there are multiple DevOps dashboards that can be created. Most of the metrics you will want to measure will fall into these three categories:
1. The Process
This is the ultimate measurement. With DevOps teams working together to improve the entire service lifecycle—from design through development to production and support—this is where DevOps data analysis will drive efficiency and effectiveness.
A good Time-to-Market dashboard can be used to measure and optimize the product development cycle. Phases of the product that are in delay can be identified quickly, and the overall delivery of the project can be minimized by acting on those insights quickly.
Quality Assurance dashboards can help in managing the release of the project. Detailed information on the cases in progress and the number of completed and failed cases all contribute to the decisions that need to be made. Bottom line, if the QA manager decides the release isn’t up to par, there better be data to back it up.
We recommend that you set alerts for key milestones that you want to reach, and get notifications if you are under or over the target. This will give you time to adjust the process and get those sequences back on track before it affects the entire process.
Set up your dashboard to include milestones, and then monitor the progress daily, even hourly if necessary. Just imagine what your daily scrum meetings will look like when you pull up a visual dashboard showing the team’s progress for build duration or cycle times? Nothing beats the visual impact of a chart to display the hard work of the entire team. And at the end of the sprint, you can pull up the historical data and discuss the output, and what can be improved in the coming sprint.
Once you execute a successful activity, you can use it again and again. With DevOps teams putting more emphasis on releasing software faster and more reliably, reusing good processes can speed up the frequency of releases without diminishing the quality.
2. The End User
The Holy Grail of measurements. If customers are not satisfied with the product or release, then it doesn’t matter how efficient or effective your DevOps process is. Customer success is the base of any business growth, and there are many metrics you can choose from to measure this: NPS (Net Promoter Score), customer satisfaction score, customer effort score, churn rate, expansion revenue, and more.
Set up a customer service dashboard to track the most crucial customer service metrics for your business. This example dashboard shows metrics for customer churn, customer engagement, and customer experience, as well as metrics like help desk tickets, CRM tracker, and call center analytics. It may not be obvious, but all of these items can be indicators that something is off and in need of a quick fix to bring value back to your customers.
Here at Sisense, our culture of customer success drives our every move. We have a company-wide commitment to delivering a product that will delight end users.
We keep track of this through our Net Promoter Score (NPS) and ask our customers straight-up if they would recommend Sisense to a friend or colleague. We know that our high scores here are a direct reflection of our DevOps processes, and how we deliver quality products to our customers.
3. The People
People metrics, or employees, are a great way to measure success. Happy employees tend to have a tremendous cascading effect on the entire company, and the accompanying processes.
If you’re doing DevOps right, then a majority of your employees will be experiencing modification (almost daily) in the way they are collaborating with other teams. HR teams can use analytics to keep their fingers on the pulse of these specific teams and stay ahead of any issues that may be swerving from the norm.
Here are some of the main HR KPIs that can be associated with DevOps: employee turnover rate, productivity, satisfaction, and even employee compensation (check to make sure you’re paying your DevOps people what they’re worth). Our HR team uses People Analytics to provide insight into organizational performance and engagement, and these example dashboards are helpful as well.
Keeping your DevOps people happy will keep the spirit of this movement (cooperation, communications, and transparency) alive and kicking in your company.
Make it Actionable – and Gain an Edge
Once you’ve started to measure DevOps KPIs, the next step will be to start implementing changes in the process by becoming predictive with your analytics. Predictive analytics uses AI (Augmented Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) to identify other patterns and relationships that might be hidden or harder to realize. This is the actionable part of our KPIs. By using predictive analytics, you can detect certain anomalies, act on them, and gain a real edge in the marketplace.
Now you’re making the most of your DevOps journey.
Teradata Ranked Highest in Every Use Case in 2019 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Data Management Solutions for Analytics Report
Teradata recognized in all four categories – traditional data warehouse, real-time data warehouse, logical data warehouse and context-independent data warehouse use cases
“Leading every use case in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities report, in combination with being recognized as a Leader – for the 17th consecutive time – in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics, once again validates our position as the authority in the new era of pervasive data intelligence,” said Martyn Etherington, CMO at Teradata. “Teradata Vantage not only gives our customers the answers they seek, it resets the bar for the entire industry.”
According to Gartner, “Demand for incorporating increasingly varied data sources and their associated use cases continues to expand in the data management solutions for analytics (DMSA) landscape. This pressure is forcing vendors to expand their capabilities. It has contributed to the expansion of the concept of the logical data warehouse (LDW), which allows multiple data types and sources to be accessed through a single logical interface, as well as to the growth in distributed database architectures.”
Data types and volumes are expanding exponentially, creating cost and complexity challenges that are uniquely difficult for the companies that use data the most. To address this growing issue, Teradata recently unveiled Teradata Vantage, its pervasive data intelligence platform that leverages 100 percent of the data to uncover real-time intelligence at scale. For companies requiring tightly integrated solutions that can accommodate massive scale and speed, and be deployed across secure, hybrid-cloud architectures, Vantage serves as the connective tissue – consolidating data, analytics, functional and tool silos into a single platform. Adding unprecedented choice, agility and flexibility to the decision to use Teradata Vantage, the platform can be deployed across public clouds, on-premises, optimized or legacy infrastructure, or as-a-service.
Gartner recommended, “For data and analytics leaders responsible for data management solutions as part of strategizing and planning information infrastructure: Evaluate the capabilities of your incumbent solution(s) against new use cases to determine if existing expertise could be used to reduce development time with a good-enough solution already in place; Plan on using a heterogeneous solution landscape overall, but try and reduce duplication of effort by categorizing use cases with regard to their target deployment platform; Use a logical data warehouse architecture when you need to integrate separate data repositories efficiently, keeping in mind performance SLAs that may be impacted by remote access; Plan for eventual integration with other data silos when scoping the effort needed to implement a specific solution to avoid crippling overhead caused by proliferating data silos.”
To learn more visit: https://www.teradata.com/Resources/Analyst-Reports/2019-Gartner-Critical-Capabilities-for-Data-Manage, or see Vantage in action at several upcoming events including Teradata Universe Madrid from April 7-10, 2019 or a Data Science Experience event at a city near you.
Gartner, “Critical Capabilities for Data Management Solutions for Analytics” by Rick Greenwald and Adam M. Ronthal, March 18, 2019.
Gartner Disclaimer
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
A DAX Tale: Not every path is straight and narrow
Hello P3 Nation! After having the privilege of working with so many of you to share your journeys and techniques I was inspired to share my own. This is a bit of an intimidating group, and I struggled a bit with what to share. After much deliberation, I compromised with myself on a journey story.
My journey does not start with a love of Excel, a great career, schooling, or anything even remotely techy. My trip kind of begins where another trip ends. In real life, the good guys don’t always wear white, and the bad guys don’t always wear black. We all live in different shades of grey, and my outfits were starting to get kind of the darker shade of grey.
Looking back, I would say that I had a narrow perspective on the opportunities that were available for someone like me. I had worked several equally terrible jobs where shift meals and air conditioning were the closest things to a benefits package that I was going to get and the thought of doing that type of work and the poverty that comes with those choices did not appeal to me. This sort of reasoning led me to places where desperation became a primary driver in my decision-making process and would surely cost me my life or my freedom. This lifestyle came to an end one day in the blink of an eye. I remember white flashing through the hospital as I was rolling through and thinking I’m not going to make it this time. I’m not going to see my daughter grow up…this is it. That’s when I knew that if something didn’t change I was going to die and not eventually of old age…like soon.
Recovery time from the hospital was slow, but after some time, I was healed enough to where I could begin to maneuver around. Determined to assist me in making some better choices my mom passed along an opportunity to do some administrative work as a contractor supporting NASA. I interviewed and was tentatively hired to do some light administrative work. I think it was for like 15$ an hour and it was the highest paying job I had ever had. It was so exciting to feel like something was finally started to work for me. It was like there was this momentum that had shifted. Most people would celebrate…me it just made uneasy. Whenever something good happens usually something worse follows.
After a couple of months of admin drudgery, I started to pick up on some of the business tasks and was introduced to Excel. I was not terribly impressed, and my interaction was limited to things like = A1+A2 or SUM(A1: A3). I started to participate in data calls where I would be tormented by different people asking for the same data in a slightly different way over and over and over again. It was at this point that someone took the time to show me something that changed my life. I will never forget the first time Anthony Loggia stopped what he was doing to show me how pivot tables and VLOOKUPS worked and how powerful this combination of things could be (Thank you, Anthony!). I was in awe. It was everything. This is where I understood how little I knew and how knowledge was going to be my weapon against redundant, productivity-draining, soul-crushing repetition.
I started reading every book I could on things Excel, and it wasn’t long before I came into contact with the PowerPivot plugin and ultimately the book “DAX Formulas for PowerPivot: A Simple Guide to the Excel Revolution” and that broke my brain. The push to understand the concepts from that book changed my life. I’m still pushing. I would say that I’ve seen greater ROI in learning those concepts than in either of the two masters degrees I earned while working and learning. I pushed through understanding modeling and basic DAX, and like magic, an opportunity to work on a database project came along. Talking about my hatred of redundancy in a job interview led the way to a chance to work on this database project. After listening to the requirements I concluded that this was not a database, this was a web app, and I was in way over my head. Did I mention that I also wasn’t a developer?
The next two years working on this project were some of the most challenging, frustrating, and rewarding yet. I won’t bore with you with the sprint by sprint details, but I got paired up with an excellent development team, and I think we ended up with a great product. An issue that showed itself quickly in our great product was that our reporting was very inflexible. This was kind of a turn off to our stakeholders, who loved the software, and our list of requirements was growing by the second. Almost immediately we were tasked with extending our reporting capabilities. Power BI Desktop and Excel were the shortest paths to where we needed to go, and by the way, we need it now. Remember how I was basic to intermediate DAX…enter SQL, hierarchies, granularity and CALCULATE.
There’s a sort of addictive quality the haze your life becomes when its all about the deadline, the problem, and the solution. The deadline and the problem consume everything, and only the quest for the answer remains. It eats all the time, and it’s Google and books and forums and books and time just trying to get the data you need and test to make sure it’s right. I can’t describe how frustrating the quest for the solution is or how glorious victory feels when you get there, but if you know you know. We met that deadline… were given more and the cycle continued. I left that project and came back and still have a small part in its continuing function as being responsible for “ad-hoc” reporting. This means when we need to add functionality to the software to meet a new requirement that we don’t want to build into the software it’s back to the lab…lol.
Thank you all for coming along on this journey with me. I know it was a little long-winded. Words are powerful things. You never know the impact a simple sentence can have on the right mind on the right day. It can be life changing. It can be lifesaving. I started this journey at 15$ hourly, 12 years later I’ve broken my first hundred thousand and am making good strides on my second. Thank you, Rob and P3! Your books and this blog have assisted me through many a long night, and the knowledge shared has benefited me greatly. The path from point A to point B is not always straight and narrow. Sometimes there are curves and bumps. Keep walking. Know where you want to go. Be fearless and know that you have something of value. If you are lucky, you will find mentors who will empower you to do more than you ever thought possible. Invest in yourself and don’t let fear keep you in your comfort zone. In that uncomfortable, scary space, amazing things are possible!
No one knows the Power BI ecosystem better than the folks who started the whole thing – us.
Let us guide your organization through the change required to become a data-oriented culture while squeezing every last drop* of value out of your Microsoft platform investment.
* – we reserve the right to substitute Olympic-sized swimming pools of value in place of “drops” at our discretion.
Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure: What Every CTO Needs to Know (Part 1)
Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure: 3 Things Every CTO Should Know
I’m often asked why I opt to use Microsoft Azure rather than Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to the available data, Amazon is outperforming Microsoft in terms of market share, and the assumption is that this means AWS must be better. This sort of favoritism is pretty common in IT circles, but the fact is that market share fails to tell the whole story. Don’t get swept up in the hype: make your own decisions based on the facts.
This is Part 1 of a blog series focusing on a fact-based comparison of Azure and AWS. My focus will be on the actual capabilities that the platforms offer, rather than on how much revenue they’re earning.
If you’re a CTO (or an aspiring one), this blog is for you.
In Part 1, we’ll look at the top 3 things you should know when it comes to comparing AWS and Azure.
#1: Who Provides the Best Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?
On the Amazon side of things, AWS was arguably the very first public provider of Cloud services. When Amazon jumped into eCommerce, they had to figure out a way to deal with traffic volatility and the servers required to run their site. Once they had this infrastructure in place for their own use, they realized they could offer it to others via the Public Cloud. Now, Amazon offers a variety of IaaS services to customers around the globe.
While all of this was going on with Amazon, Microsoft was leading the way when it comes to servers, tools, and enterprise services. As Microsoft became increasingly aware of the importance of the Cloud, they began to divert resources to the development of virtualization technology. Over time, Azure was developed. At the same time, Microsoft’s Internet and Search teams were devoting time and money to developing Bing and other Internet solutions — and this has set Microsoft up to combine everything it’s developed into Azure as a Cloud computing platform with an existing enterprise-level customer base.
So, while AWS was certainly ahead of its time, Microsoft has arguably caught up. Plus, Azure has branched out and currently runs on Linux almost as much as it does Windows.
When it comes to the best IaaS provider, Microsoft and AWS are on even footing.
#2: Which Company Offers the Best Hybrid Cloud?
These days, most companies are focused on Hybrid Cloud. This involves having both on-site and Cloud-based infrastructure in place. Given its connection with various enterprise clients from the beginning, Microsoft saw this coming and has put a large amount of energy into developing Hybrid Cloud solutions. Over time, Microsoft has added Hybrid Cloud integration to the majority of its products, all of which are now developed with the Cloud in mind and then back-ported onto physical servers. Plus, the Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server allows users to run their Windows Server workloads in the Cloud with their on-premise licenses.
Meanwhile, AWS has taken a different approach. Given their origins as a Cloud computing provider, their goal has been to encourage clients to fully make the switch to Cloud. You can back up your existing Windows server to the AWS Cloud, but that’s the extent of their “Hybrid” offerings.
The clear winner when it comes to the Hybrid Cloud? Azure.
#3: Whose Cloud Platform Offers the Most Complete Capabilities?
In terms of pure infrastructure, it would appear that AWS is more “complete” from a Cloud perspective. But when you think about item #1 above, you’ll realize that this detail alone isn’t enough to call Amazon the more complete Cloud provider.
Let’s consider Software as a Service (SaaS). Microsoft Office is now running as SaaS, making it easy for employees at organizations of all sizes to access email, collaborate on documents, store information, and more.
But that’s not all. Consider the various business applications that are essential to many enterprises, such as Dynamics 365 for Sales/Service (aka Dynamics CRM). If you combine Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and other Microsoft Azure features such as Power BI, you have a full suite of Cloud capabilities.
With AWS, you can always “lift and shift” your systems to the AWS Cloud — but then your IT department is left managing that infrastructure. With Microsoft, this is taken care of for you, freeing up your IT department to pursue other tasks.
Which platform offers the most complete capabilities? Azure.
The Clear Technical Winner: Microsoft Azure
Given the facts above, . Watch for Part 2 of this blog series to learn more about the “Azure vs. AWS” debate.
Want to learn more about what Azure can do for your business? and watch this short video.
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About Krisgo
I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon 