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Top Five CIO Blogs Of January 2020

February 7, 2020 BI News and Info

Top Five CIO Blogs Of January 2020

About Jean Loh

Jean Loh is the director, Global Audience Marketing at SAP. She is an experienced marketing and communication professional, currently responsible for developing thought leadership content that is unbiased and audience-led while addressing market challenges to illuminate and solve the unmet needs of CFOs, CIOs, and the wider global finance and IT audience.

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Top Five CIO Blogs Of December 2019

January 12, 2020 BI News and Info

Top Five CIO Blogs Of December 2019

Jean Loh

Happy 2020! As we rang out the old year, our readers were looking ahead at different perspectives on data management – and how to better manage their ERP software to take best advantage of that data. Evolving toward becoming an intelligent enterprise demands no less.

Why Your Data Should Have Empathy

Why SMBs Should Upgrade Their ERP To Transform Their Business

All You Need To Know About Master Data Governance

What Would An X-Ray Reveal About Your ERP System?

Recessions, Big Data, Data Science, And The Liberating Power Of “Own It”

Follow CIO Knowledge on The Digitalist to keep on top of the most important issues and trends facing IT leaders today.

About Jean Loh

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Five Marketing Technologies Transforming The Hotel Business

January 1, 2020 BI News and Info

You cannot have a successful business without marketing, including in the hotel business. Fortunately, there have never been more opportunities to use marketing to build and grow your hotel business.

Hotel Tech Report reports that more than 500 million new international trips are expected over the next decade. Therefore, if you want to attract people from all over the globe to your property, you need to employ as many resources as you can get.

Hotel marketing encompasses a wide variety of topics, and if you want to leverage marketing successfully, you need to stay on top of the latest trends. The following are some of the technologies that are transforming the world of hotel marketing in front of our eyes.

Voice search

Most people type a question into Google on their smartphone when they need some information. But the times are changing. The next generation of Internet users prefers to ask their devices directly. In fact, a third of the US population – roughly 112 million people – use voice search every month. These people represent a good chunk of your target demographic, so you need to cater to their needs. By optimizing your website for voice search, you can get more exposure. When a person takes out their phone and makes an inquiry, your voice-search optimized website will pop up as one of the first results. What’s more, with this technology, you can also allow your guests to book their rooms using voice control.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence may have seemed like a sci-fi concept just a few decades ago; however, today it’s a reality. The technology has the ability to provide valuable, actionable insights into your customers’ wishes and needs. It can also help you keep your customers satisfied without hiring additional employees. What can you do with such a high-tech concept? Well, you can use a chatbot on your website to ensure that your visitors can consistently get answers to all of their questions. Most modern websites use chatbots, which is why the global chatbot market is expected to exceed $ 994 million in the next five years, according to Market Watch.

Augmented reality

Augmented reality may be the most interesting marketing tactic you have available today. According to Statista, the augmented reality market will reach $ 18.8 billion by 2020. The technology alters a person’s perception of their surroundings through the use of technology, and it allows hotel owners to change the way their visitors see and experience their environment. For example, you can use the technology to sell more rooms online by enhancing their features, and some hotels allow their guests to see depictions of their favorite actors and singers in their rooms. You can also use this technology to give your visitors virtual keys that allow them to open their rooms using their smartphones.

Virtual reality

Some people may use the terms interchangeably, but virtual reality should not be confused with augmented reality. Virtual reality allows you to enhance the guest experience by allowing them to see their rooms first-hand in the virtual world before they even set foot in your hotel. Considering that roughly 80% of consumers feel positively about branded VR tactics, it’s likely that your customers will appreciate this. Other ways to use VR include enabling your staff to show guests local attractions to encourage them to stay a few extra days or return for a future visit.

Remarketing

Remarketing allows you to market your business to people who have already shown interest in it. If a person previously visited your website without booking anything, you can use specific tools to reconnect with them and make the sale. Here’s a quick example of a successful remarketing operation from outside the travel industry: the global leader in paper products, Kimberly-Clark, has used remarketing tactics to improve its conversion rates between 50% and 60%. You can use Google Analytics to see which demographics visit your website the most, then use a tool like Google Ads or AdRoll that will target your key demographics and show them ads and banners for your business on the sites they visit.

Final thoughts

This has just scratched the surface of hotel marketing. The main takeaway is to recognize that digital marketing is the way to go. Although old forms of marketing can still work, you need to use digital marketing to successfully advertise your hotel. If you fail to do so, you will fall further behind your competitors.

Explore another hot technology: Blockchain And The Future Of The Travel Industry.

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Five Marketing Automating Techniques To Achieve Jaw-Dropping Audience Engagement

December 27, 2019 BI News and Info

Every time we start using a new marketing automation tool, it is natural to be very hopeful about it. However, we tend to forget that these tools are not a panacea that will magically improve ROI, increase the speed of content production, and improve our productivity.

Marketing automation technology is just a tool. No matter how well made, they are of little use if you do not know what to do with them. The real benefit comes from perceiving it as an integral part of your marketing strategy rather than a magic wand that will automatically set things right.

So which specific techniques should be applied? Let’s find out!

1. Use of dynamic content

Dynamic content adapts to the needs and interests of each individual client, depending on their past behavior. It may be implemented in elements within your Web site, e-mail marketing campaign, ads, or in other more ingenious ways. Unlike standardized interactions, it creates an individualized experience for each customer, creating the impression of a personalized relationship between the brand and the client and working towards positive engagement.

Of course, such an approach is impossible to carry out manually. You need to automatically collect and analyze data on the behavior of each customer and establish the algorithms that allow for this degree of personalization. And the effort really does pay off. According to a study by Infosys, 31% of customers say they would like their shopping experiences to be more personalized and will pay attention to the businesses that do this for them.

2. Drip campaigns

It is obvious that marketing automation is effective – 95 percent of companies that tried it report benefitting from it. However, not everybody can afford to spend months or even years gathering client data before implementing an automation scheme. Aren’t there other more straightforward and easier methods? Yes, there are!

Drip campaigns are one of the simplest and most effective ways of engaging your customers through marketing automation. They do not require excessive amounts of data collected for long periods. They take pre-determined actions based on customer behaviors. It is a much more effective approach than just meeting everybody with the same universal message. Instead, you can send one message to those who just subscribed to your mailing list, provide additional content to those who visited certain pages of your website, and so on. Drip e-mails are reported to have 80% higher open rates than non-customized e-mails – a good reason to try them out.

3. Mastering list segmentation

If you know what you are doing, your leads will bring much more information than you might think at a glance. Knowing this, you can quite precisely divide them into segments based on various factors: age, gender, geographical location, current engagement level, buying behavior, and so on.

Of course, you can do all this manually – but it is even remotely viable only for very small businesses and makes the entire arrangement prone to human error and misjudgment. Most marketing automation tools allow you to easily segment your lists based on settings – after setting it up once, you will not need to spend any more time on it. The system will automatically create segments based on only the metrics that are important to you.

4. Study the leaders

Nine times out of ten, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Every industry has its leaders – those who are far ahead of their closest competitors. They do not acquire such a position randomly – it is always a result of something they do better than anybody else. You can spend years trying to improve the performance of your automation methods by trial and error.

Alternatively, you can identify such a leader in your industry and study this company closely. Why is it so far ahead? Does it use a specific new technology? A particular approach to marketing automation? Content structure? Frequency at which they send e-mails to their leads?

There is no need to discover something new if it has already been discovered by somebody else. Imitate their approach. Outsource certain processes to the same specialists they use. Or simply pay them to teach you the practices that make them successful.

5. Use of reminder e-mails

Typically, reminder e-mails are used to decrease the likelihood of accidental no-show appointments. However, many businesses can effectively use them to improve engagement with clients who did not order products or services for an extended period. Customers do not always do this deliberately – sometimes people just naturally drift away from a business because they first do not need its products or services, and then they forget how much they used to like dealing with it. You can effectively re-engage such customers by sending reminder e-mails.

6. Use a new customer cadence

Marketers know that retaining an existing customer is easier than acquiring a new one – which is why it is so important to make a new client feel welcome after the first interaction. After a client buys from you for the first time, make sure to thank them and suggest some additional benefits they may enjoy from your business. You may use a single e-mail or a series of e-mails over a longer period to offer different possibilities.

Marketing automation doesn’t only make a marketer’s life easier; it creates many opportunities that would otherwise be impossible – so make sure you use it to its fullest!

For more insight on customer engagement, read “Multichannel Engagement In The Experience Economy.”

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Top Five Finance Blogs Of November 2019

December 10, 2019 BI News and Info

Top Five Finance Blogs Of November 2019

Jean Loh

As automation technology continues to top the list of our most popular topics, the drive toward intelligent finance is clearly the prime focus for CFOs. What’s the best technology choice for finance transformation? How can order-to-cash processes be modernized? What’s on the near horizon for finance? Read on if you missed any of these great articles.

Five Automation Technologies To Catalyze Finance Transformation

Modernize Your Order-To-Cash Processes With Digitalization And Automation

Finance Transformation Is Everywhere: Digitalization Is The Biggest Reason

Road Map To The Future Of Finance: Shining The Lights Ahead

Your New Operating Model: Creating The Work

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

About Jean Loh

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Top Five CIO Blogs Of November 2019

December 7, 2019 SAP

Top Five CIO Blogs Of November 2019

Jean Loh

About Jean Loh

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Digitalist Magazine

Five Automation Technologies To Catalyze Finance Transformation

November 20, 2019 SAP

Part 3 of the “Finance Transformation” series that explores how finance can take the lead in driving their companies towards an intelligent enterprise

To ensure that the business operates smoothly, finance organizations routinely execute a multitude of operational tasks. But as the world becomes globally connected, new players with new business models emerge, and regulatory complexity grows, businesses are beginning to expect even more from their finance teams. They need finance to look beyond those operational tasks and provide more sophisticated support – such as real-time analysis, business model simulation, and predictive, forward-looking insights. This enhanced support helps leaders make optimum decisions to adapt and shape business models for the future of their enterprise.

Benno Nov fig Five Automation Technologies To Catalyze Finance Transformation

No doubt, those operational tasks still need to be done. And this increasingly heavy workload needs to be completed without any additional headcount. This is where a new generation of automation technologies comes in.

Tools that transform

Your organization has doubtless deployed automation to streamline processes, reduce mundane work, and realize cost efficiencies. And that’s been great.

But we know the business needs more insight to make the right decisions. The insights delivered by traditional systems are backward-looking, providing reporting on “actuals.” Leading finance organizations are discovering the next generation of intelligent technologies, transforming core finance processes while also delivering predictive insights that can be used to proactively steer the business.

Let’s take a look at five key opportunities.

An assisted user interface can provide context-sensitive help, including supports and alerts that are specific to each business situation. Conversational interactions and speech-controlled assistance can help automate routine finance tasks. For example, think of a finance representative who is conversing with a customer. An assisted user interface can check for open issues such as unresolved service tickets or unpaid invoices, automatically displaying data about these issues on the rep’s computer screen. Now the rep knows exactly what the customer is thinking about – why he didn’t pay an invoice, for example – and how to resolve the issue without having to dig through multiple systems or screens.

Intelligent finance applications can help simplify, accelerate, and automate processes. In traditional systems, finance processes have been hindered by technical limitations. But those barriers have been removed with blazing-fast in-memory database technology. On top of that, optimized and simplified data structures allow companies to build use cases to support employees in a way that was not possible before. Using these new technologies, some leading software companies have redesigned their applications to support embedded self-service analytics with powerful predictive functionality. The best solutions can help you make the right decisions faster than ever before.

Intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), and predictive analytics can simplify finance operations. Rule-based automation allows firms to specify preferences for specific operations and execute them according to the rules. In contrast, machine learning technologies learn from past transactions and customer decisions, sensing decision-making patterns and using those patterns to make future choices. RPA technologies run repetitive, rule-based monotone tasks and connect disparate systems, so you can free humans from huge volumes of manual tasks across diverse systems. Predictive analytics drill down into past transactions and use the insights derived to anticipate what may happen next, enabling your team to make more accurate strategic decisions.

A universal journal can help eliminate redundancy by recording and storing every financial transaction in one table. With actual, plan, and simulation data in one place, a universal journal helps you create a single source of financial truth that is both consistent and easily reconciled. Information is also accessible for instant, precise analytical research.

An integrated data platform centrally stores both transactional and analytical data across systems and provides access to all of your information with real-time speed. It allows users to find data correlations and to drill down to find the root cause, no matter the data’s original source.

Path to intelligent finance

The benefits of enhanced automation are significant for today’s finance organizations. Intelligent finance innovation can improve operational efficiency while enhancing governance and compliance. What’s more, leading companies are reducing costs by automating end-to-end processes.

With advanced technologies, finance organizations can identify and rank information that positively correlates with fraud or noncompliance, helping them detect and prevent costly anomalies. Proactive, context-sensitive assistance boosts the productivity of financial experts, freeing them for more value-added efforts. And greater insights into the future are helping these firms make better decisions that facilitate their desired business outcomes.

Many finance leaders believe they have all of the automation they need to serve the business. But as the business increasingly asks for more from finance organizations, it’s time to consider advanced automation solutions that go beyond streamlining operational tasks. The latest generation of technologies is poised to deliver insight that can catalyze your finance transformation.

Are you ready to reconsider the role of automation in your finance organization?

Join the second SAP Intelligent Finance virtual event on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020, and explore the new reality driving finance transformation. Register now.

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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Top Five CIO Blogs Of October 2019

November 10, 2019 BI News and Info

Top Five CIO Blogs Of October 2019

Jean Loh

For leaders in technology, the constant challenge is to achieve the right balance – of new approaches vs. proven methodologies, of emerging technologies vs. legacy systems, of knowing your customers vs. respecting their privacy. Each of these popular blogs offers a thoughtful perspective to help you make the right decisions in your evolution toward becoming an intelligent enterprise.

What’s The Best Way To Prepare Your Data For Business Transformation?

Why Intelligence Is The New Oil For The Future Enterprise

Executive Mandate #1: Become Value-Driven, Not Data-Driven

New ERP? Don’t Forget The BPM!

How To Build Trust Through Personalization

About Jean Loh

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How An African Safari’s “Big Five” Can Inform Digitalization Road Maps (Part 2)

November 10, 2019 SAP

Part of the “Digital Finance Transformation” series that provides a framework for CFOs to move forward confidently on the journey toward digital transformation

In this series, we have presented a big-picture perspective on the five steps required for a digital transformation. In our previous blog, we used an African safari as a metaphor for the importance of “capturing” each one of the “Big Five.” In our discussions with CFOs, we often find that they are looking for more specifics. Here are more insights on each of those steps.

Prepare: Align expectations, timelines, and requirements procedures

Temporal dependencies such as regulatory requirements, market influences, and competitive factors have a decisive impact on the project timeline and deliverables. Therefore, it is important to discuss all those factors with your stakeholders and align and agree upon them, since the influence of a single one might lead to a chain reaction.

Organizational requirements regarding resources and restrictions in technical and/or functional requirements will influence the scope and thereby also the timeline, as well as resource utilization. A strategic approach might necessitate working with iterative, or “agile,” project methodologies instead of the classic “waterfall” concept. (Agile allows for change and deploying on a continuous basis rather than one big deployment at the end. Waterfall is a sequential list of tasks where most are dependent on previous tasks.)

Introduce best practices

Elaboration of your digitalization roadmap will depend on multiple factors and decisions. In the context of the data quality and future use of existing data sources, as well as considering existing and new processes, we distinguish between brownfield and greenfield approaches. Recommendations for the roadmap are highly dependent on each company’s situation, especially regarding specific challenges and fields of action. Bringing the best-practice approach to your stakeholders allows them to develop a clear and structured understanding of a proven and established way forward based on how others have solved similar issues. Of course, best practices never perfectly fit an organization’s specific requirements but should serve as a basis to derive a tailor-made digitalization roadmap.

Explore: Identify gaps and deltas (company-specific vs. best practices)

It’s important to know about relevant changes, options, and challenges before defining and blueprinting your digitalization roadmap. For example, some companies decided years ago to implement costing-based profitability analysis (COPA) in the ERP environment. Nowadays, with the new technologies, options, and features, most companies opt to implement account-based profitability analysis, which is highly recommended to unleash the full potential of your system.

COPA groups costs and revenues according to value fields and costing-based valuation approaches, both of which you can define yourself. It gives you access at all times to a complete, short-term profitability report. Cost of goods sold is recognized after goods are billed and before being shipped.

Account-based profitability analysis is organized in accounts and using an account-based valuation approach. The distinguishing characteristic of this form is its use of cost and revenue elements. It provides you with a profitability report that is permanently reconciled with financial accounting. Cost of goods sold is recognized after goods are shipped and before being billed.

To move from costing-based to account-based profitability analysis, a clear strategy is required, as this type of change in the landscape will have a big impact downstream.

Implement: Realize, deploy, test

Does it really make a difference how you go about realizing the digital journey? Yes! For example, missing a legal requirement could result in noncompliance.

Depending on whether you selected the agile or waterfall methodology in the preparation phase, the approach going forward will be different. Nevertheless, general steps such as realize, test, and deploy activities stay the same. This is valid as well for the solution quality and stability when you are considering standard and non-standard requirements. For sure, implementing a specific approval workflow for non-standard requirements or change requests helps to differentiate the critical from the non-critical.

In the end, we recommend future-proofing the environment by sticking to standards and best practices where possible.

Challenge the status quo

Continuously compare and improve. The business world is moving fast, and technology is changing even faster. Good consultants are rare and often occupied with other customer projects. Hence, for a successful journey, it is important to have an experienced internal project manager take the lead, working closely with the external consultants. Being in contact with peers and market experts to compare your own journey against others is key. We are all a big community, supporting each other in the journey and working together toward a great future!

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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How An African Safari’s “Big Five” Can Inform Digitalization Road Maps

October 31, 2019 SAP

Part of the “Digital Finance Transformation” series that provides a framework for CFOs to move forward confidently on the journey toward digital transformation

On an African safari, the ultimate goal is to see the “Big Five:” lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo. Seeing four of the five is still quite impressive, but seeing three or fewer might leave you feeling disappointed.

We would extend this concept as a metaphor for digitalization road maps. Over the course of many projects, we have observed that the following five steps will define success (missing one of the Big Five will fall short of some expectations, limit memorable digital exploration, and result in an incomplete project):

Process How An African Safari’s “Big Five” Can Inform Digitalization Road Maps

Prepare. Align customer expectations, timelines, and requirements procedures. An aligned and agreed-upon understanding of important aspects is key. These include, for example, the company’s strategic approach; organizational, functional, and technical requirements; a suitable project methodology; and an appropriate derived timeline. They all are interlinked and build the foundation for the next steps.

Introduce best practices. The next step is to introduce best practices. Why start with best practices instead of collecting customer-specific requirements? Because starting the journey to a digitalization road map without knowing the status quo regarding possibilities, options, and restrictions will limit the ability to break up established and outdated structures and mindsets – and that’s what will lead to real innovation. It’s like setting up a wish list for vacation on a best guess without knowing what the destination is famous for.

Explore: Identify gaps and deltas (your own vs. best practices). Being aware of best practices is a prerequisite to identify gaps in the customer’s infrastructure, processes, customization, and/or master data. The idea of best practices is to come back to standards as much as possible by cutting out all unnecessary steps. Start understanding best practices from the high level on infrastructures, going deeper into processes, customizing, and master data to identify gaps between current and to-be solutions. All identified gaps are gathered and summarized in a customer repository, which serves as the basis for the project implementation as well as for tracking.

Implement: Realize, deploy, test. The exploration ends with a well-defined and logically structured summarization of customer requirements shown within the requirements repository. This is often called a traceability matrix. It’s a document that correlates any two baseline documents that require a many-to-many relationship to check the completeness of the relationships. Also, it’s used to ensure transparency, and to track and check the status to ensure that project requirements are fully met within the deployment and test phase.

Challenge the status quo: Continuously compare and improve. To ensure the success of the customer’s transformation journey, continuous comparison against the status quo is essential. This allows changes in the environment and appropriate actions to be identified. Typically, changes that must be considered are mainly related to legal requirements and new releases of systems and tools. While creating the road map, future digital trends need to be included and compared to the overall innovation strategy.

The digital world is always developing, requiring ongoing questioning of the status quo and continuous improvement. Happy journey!

In the second part of our African safari blogs, we’ll explore in more detail the five steps required for digital transformation.

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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Tag Archives: Five

Top Five CIO Blogs Of January 2020

Sharelines

About Jean Loh

Top Five CIO Blogs Of December 2019

Sharelines

About Jean Loh

Voice search

Artificial intelligence

Augmented reality

Virtual reality

Remarketing

Final thoughts

1. Use of dynamic content

2. Drip campaigns

3. Mastering list segmentation

4. Study the leaders

5. Use of reminder e-mails

6. Use a new customer cadence

Top Five Finance Blogs Of November 2019

Sharelines

About Jean Loh

Top Five CIO Blogs Of November 2019

Sharelines

About Jean Loh

Tools that transform

Path to intelligent finance

Top Five CIO Blogs Of October 2019

Sharelines

About Jean Loh

Prepare: Align expectations, timelines, and requirements procedures

Introduce best practices

Explore: Identify gaps and deltas (company-specific vs. best practices)

Implement: Realize, deploy, test

Challenge the status quo

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