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Tag Archives: organization

4 Ways Data Visualization Will Help Your Organization Become More Data-Driven

January 31, 2021   TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO DataVisualization scaled e1611632048213 696x365 4 Ways Data Visualization Will Help Your Organization Become More Data Driven

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Is your boss constantly bugging you about getting better at data analytics? Nowadays, it’s not just the data science team that has to think about how to communicate with data. Everyone in a data-driven organization is expected to understand dashboards and develop meaningful data visualizations. 

According to recent research by IDC, 70 percent of managers and directors confirm that in the past 12 months their executives have explicitly called for their enterprises to become more data-driven.

So how do you get that done? The latest generation of analytic tools provides the perfect way for both technical and non-technical users to get powerful insights and make an impact. 

Support Business Users with Robust Analytics It’s more important than ever to provide business users with robust analytics and data visualization tools to support smarter, faster decisions. 

Here are four ways data visualization can help your organization:

Improved response times: Data visualization puts the data into the users’ hands allowing them to more quickly identify issues and improve response times.

Greater simplicity: Using visualizations allows users to get the big picture and see the details at the same time. It simplifies the data by allowing the users to interact only with relevant data.

 4 Ways Data Visualization Will Help Your Organization Become More Data Driven

Easier visualization of patterns: Have you ever tried to find patterns in data while reviewing thousands of lines in a spreadsheet? Using visualization allows users to better absorb the data and see new paths. This enables users to identify new patterns and trends that were impossible to see using tabular data. It allows decision-makers to view data using graphical representations including charts, fever charts, and heat maps.

Enhanced collaboration: Collaboration gives teams access to the strengths and skills of everyone involved by combining the experiences of the entire group. These skills can be used to solve problems faster and improve innovation. Using advanced visualizations makes it easier for teams to collaborate. Instead of having to consume tens of thousands of lines of data, they can rely on visual representations that consolidate the data.

Bottom line: AI-driven visual analytics and dashboards allow companies to discover solutions quicker, explore potential patterns, and improve decision making.

Bottom line: AI-driven visual analytics and dashboards allow companies to discover solutions quicker, explore potential patterns, and improve decision making. Click To Tweet

Ready your business for the future with TIBCO Spotfire® analytics and speed up time to insights for better business outcomes. Check out this guide to how to enable a truly adaptive, data-driven organization to get started. 

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4 Moments of Truth That Can Force a Change in a Sales Organization

December 1, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
crmnav 4 Moments of Truth That Can Force a Change in a Sales Organization

Sales Management and Sales Operations can face multiple “moments of truth” during uncertain times that might force a change.

1. New sales leadership

Sales organization must continuously reinvent themselves to meet new market expectations head on. Changes in sales leadership and changes in sales strategies are to be expected. An organization must have flexible sales systems that can adapt to these shifts in leadership and direction without re-creating the wheel.

2. Acquisition or consolidation of the sales organization

Today’s buyers have become more self-sufficient in determining if a product, service or company can solve their business problems. Sellers play a smaller role in the buying journey and need to focus on engaging at the right time, with the right information. An organization must have flexible sales systems that can conform to new sales methodologies while decreasing non-productive administrative time and effort.

3. Pressure due to flat revenue growth

When organizations talk about ‘sales transformation’ it oftentimes revolves around the premise of shifting gears from being less reactive to more proactive in their selling activities. Most sales systems can streamline the sales cycle, most can measure your pipeline against sales goals, but it’s the ones that leverage sales data to proactively surface cross-sell opportunities and identify key decision-makers that take destiny in their own hands – reducing their sales production costs and growing revenue.

4. Unproductive use of technology

To successfully implement meaningful change requires the sustained buy-in and enablement of sales managers – those with the most direct impact on the front-line sellers. Sales managers need to shield their sellers from non-selling activities and provide the tools that empower them to engage with every member of a company’s buying committee. Organizations need to leverage technology to make it easier to find “the ones” you should be connecting to.

Now is the time to look at Microsoft Dynamics 365.

 Why Microsoft Dynamics 365:

  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 is ranked as an industry-leading Sales Force Automation solution by Forrester and Gartner for its ability to move beyond sales management to empower sellers.
  • It is the first innovator with LinkedIn offered at half the price of any other vendor in the market.
  • Microsoft is the only vendor to offer hybrid deployment options.
  • Microsoft has a complete cloud vision including infrastructure, platform, applications and data: Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn.
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an end-to-end (Lead to Cash) business application solution.
  • Provide your sellers with actionable insights like lead score and pipeline health using predictive analytics (machine learning).
  • Optimize productivity by transforming from data entry to guiding sellers people to the next best action to take with the customer.
  • Prioritize your pipeline and accelerate success with real-time analytics and predictive modeling.
  • Strengthen relationships by helping sellers be relevant with up to the moment data and insights from Office 365, LinkedIn and Dynamics 365.

Why Crowe:

Crowe is one of the largest public accounting, consulting, and technology firms in the United States. Crowe’s Microsoft practice is focused on delivering best-in-class customer engagement through industry specialized accelerators and productivity enhancing apps delivered across Business Apps (Dynamics 365), Modern Workplace (Security / Compliance), and, Data and AI (Big Data, Data Warehouse, Analytics, AI).

If your sales team is ready for a change, Crowe can help. Contact us today.

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner www.CroweCRM.com

Follow us on Twitter: @CroweCRM

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Manage Devices and Protect Your Organization with Microsoft Endpoint Manager (aka Intune)

November 26, 2020   CRM News and Info

Intune, or as they have recently rebranded themselves — Microsoft Endpoint Manager, is a unified management platform for all your devices. Those devices could include Windows, 10 Mac, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Android, etc.

REMOTE WORKFORCE

As companies more towards a remote workforce they will see more and more devices accessing their data. Yes, this helps speed up your productivity and the way you do business. However, this could be a HUGE liability and threat for your organization.

It’s imperative that your organization protects access to your environment at all times.

You have important data that could be exposed unintentionally through your employee devices. The more devices that you have on your network the more you could be exposed. Protect your organization from potential threats with JourneyTEAM and Microsoft Endpoint Manager (aka Intune).

GROUPS and CONTROLLED ACCESS

Microsoft Endpoint Manager allows organizations to set up groups to be able to control how information is accessed. These groups can be done by project, title, access level, or as you choose.

When you choosing a device and data management system there are four different things that are of importance. Those are the flexibility, integrations, scalability, and security of the Endpoint Management System.

FLEXIBILITY

In the flexibility realm this allows organizations to decide between an on-premise environment or a cloud only environment. Microsoft’s Endpoint Manager allows organizations to have those types of setups. They let you manage devices that are company owned as well as devices that are personally owned.

INTEGRATIONS

The integrations part is important because you want to have deep integrations with Azure active directory and Microsoft 365. There are also tools like Windows defender for Endpoint Manager, which is another solution that enhances management capabilities in relation to windows 10 devices.

SCALABILITY

When you think of process automation and deploying, managing, and updating a windows 10 devices  that could be a lot of work. Scalability is where JourneyTEAM and Microsoft Endpoint Manager can help add that additional level of security and growth.

You can create application level controls to provide secure access to your company or work data. Whether the device is fully managed by the company, or if it’s is just without enrollment — you can manage it. And it’s just accessing specific applications that happened to be part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This could be your email, documents on SharePoint, OneDrive or Microsoft Teams.

INTEGRATIONS

And then lastly you have deep integrations with Azure active directory.  Here you can leverage conditional access, which has basically rules around how, when and where you’re able to access specific company data. You have ways to gain control and security

So again, Microsoft Endpoint Manager gives you the flexibility, integration, scalability, and security. Those are the four important points to think about in relation to your endpoint manager system.

FIND OUT MORE

If you’re interested in learning more about Microsoft Endpoint Manager (aka Intune), please contact us at JourneyTEAM. One of our business development managers will help you get pointed in the right direction.

CLICK HERE – To see full article

Contact JourneyTEAM
We are consultants that can help make Microsoft Lists a reality! Visit our website to find out more, or call us now at 800.439.6456.


Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

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Teradata’s Hillary Ashton Named Chief Product Officer; Tapped to Lead Cloud Innovation and New Product Organization

September 10, 2020   BI News and Info

The new organization will focus on innovation, quality and value to customers looking to solve their most complex data challenges

Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the cloud data analytics platform company, today announced the promotion of Hillary Ashton to Chief Product Officer, as well as the formation of a new Products organization that drives all ongoing technology innovations while ensuring that Teradata products remain of the highest quality and deliver differentiated value to customers.

Hillary Ashton 280x400 Teradata’s Hillary Ashton Named Chief Product Officer; Tapped to Lead Cloud Innovation and New Product Organization“In our search for a Chief Product Officer, Hillary’s credentials were simply unmatched. Since joining in November last year, she has proven her strong leadership skills in accelerating our cloud offerings, and she brings an outside-in, customer-focused lens,” said Steve McMillan, CEO of Teradata. “I expect that – with Hillary at the helm – our new Products organization will hold a crucial role in Teradata’s future success, as it ensures that our technology innovations are forward-looking, keeping customer needs at the forefront, and aligned to Teradata’s cloud-first priority.”

Leveraging her strong grounding in analytics, cloud and leading-edge technologies, Ashton will head a newly assembled global Products Organization – a diverse team responsible for innovation, product management, engineering and quality, and ensuring that Teradata’s Vantage hybrid multi-cloud platform delivers differentiated value to customers. Ashton will also be responsible for defining strategic direction for Teradata’s cloud-first portfolio, engineering this foundation into high-quality products that also deliver a world-class user experience for customers.

“My focus has always been – and will remain – accelerating Teradata’s efforts to bring products to market that delight our users and meet customers’ needs today and tomorrow,” said Hillary Ashton, Chief Product Officer at Teradata. “By first considering the needs of the market, our customers, and our prospects, we will advance our hybrid multi-cloud platform that provides differentiated value to our customers and growth for Teradata. I’m truly honored to step into this role and look forward to driving our innovation, expanding our market share and increasing our revenue.”

Prior to Teradata, Ashton served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of PTC’s Augmented Reality (AR) business unit. In this role, she was responsible for all operational aspects of the Vuforia SaaS business and its product lines, including executive leadership and vision, strategy, product management, engineering, sales and marketing. Other roles include serving as SVP of Analytics SaaS solutions at Manthan and as Director, Customer Intelligence at SAS. In each of these roles, Ashton has contributed to expanding market share and increasing revenue.

Ashton is a graduate of Franklin & Marshall College where she earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in Government. She has spoken at various conferences and events worldwide, and in 2019 she was named to the National Diversity Council’s (NDC) annual list of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology.

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The Intelligent Public Sector Organization: Three Ways Forward

March 14, 2020   SAP

Public sector organizations are experiencing tremendous change. While the core mission to protect the community, provide services, and help the economy prosper remains firmly in place, rising constituent expectations for service, convenience, and data protection are putting organizations to the test.

IndustrySummit PublicSector BannerImage 250x250 The Intelligent Public Sector Organization: Three Ways Forward

Much is at stake, and failure can cause real harm: unsafe or unhealthy communities, degraded citizen services or lack of services, economic or political irrelevance, and loss of power or reputation.

Keeping pace at a time when constituents expect experiences and interactions modeled on the kind they receive from digital natives is no small task. To continue to fulfill its mission, government must embrace technical, cultural, and organizational change to be more responsive, adaptable, and transparent.

The following strategic priorities for becoming an intelligent enterprise are helping governments to move forward:

Put the citizen at the center

Governments today seek ways to simplify complicated processes and provide more personalized, self-managed services for citizens across all channels. Organizations are employing intelligent technologies with conversational UIs and natural-language processing for better delivery of services. Agencies are becoming service orchestrators and information brokers capable of supporting end-to-end customer journeys across departments.

One result is greater automation that supports the personalization of core services. This frees up employees to focus on the more complex services citizens need. Another result is that organizations are beginning to deliver services proactively without compromising privacy and permission, rather than expecting the citizen to request services.

With two-way authentication, encryption, and blockchain technology, for example, organizations can enable constituents to approve the use of their personal data one time only – thus streamlining their experiences. And by collecting experience data, government agencies can also get a much clearer picture of how citizens engage with them and then make adjustments to more effectively deliver on policy mandates.

Leverage data as an asset

As governments seek to use data to inform decision-making, they must find ways to more effectively share data across their own agencies to develop an integrated picture. By breaking down silos with a consolidated view of data, organizations will be able to share data more freely – and even use it for predictive analytics and simulations. This can improve strategic planning and policy-making.

At the same time, agencies need to prioritize the protection of data – at rest or in transit – from disclosure, modification, or destruction. Key to all of this is a rationalized approach to data management that supports an organization-wide “single source of truth” that integrates inter-organizational and external data.

To this end, organizations are moving toward centralized, easy-to-use data management platforms with intuitive interfaces that simplify access to information and empower stakeholders at all levels to maximize the value of data wherever possible.

Reimagine business processes and models

Government agencies are now moving to redefine their core processes and service delivery models – modernizing legacy systems and laying a digital foundation for data-driven decision-making. Everyday tasks are being automated, enabling employees to focus on the cases that require human engagement.

Some examples include the automation of constituent-facing services (such as social services, call centers, and automobile licensing and registration requests) and internal processes (such as invoice approvals and payment-matching).

Automation, invariably, involves the generation of data – which can then be used by machine learning algorithms to identify patterns. For example, agencies could use such information to optimize tax collection strategies based on individuals’ payment history.

Moving forward, agencies could even establish networks of government and non-government stakeholders that use decentralized ledger technologies such as blockchain to power further process simplification. Gathering data from multiple sources and using advanced analytics will enable the government to intelligently deliver the right services to the right people at the right time.

The future is bright

Increasingly, the most successful public agencies will be those that reimagine their end-to-end business processes using the tools and technologies now widely available. These agencies will shift routine tasks from humans to business systems using intelligent automation to serve citizens better than ever before.

Join our virtual event to learn more

Want to find out more about the latest trends and innovations for today’s public sector organizations? Register today to join our flagship 60-minute virtual industry event:

SAP Industries Forum 2020: Public Sector
Experience the Intelligent Enterprise
Thursday, March 26, 2020
8:00 a.m. PDT, 11:00 a.m. EDT, 4:00 p.m. CET

Register now

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Free vs. Paid CRM Solutions: Which Is Better for Your Organization?

December 19, 2019   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
crmnav Free vs. Paid CRM Solutions: Which Is Better for Your Organization?

Thinking of acquiring or changing your customer relationship management solution? The sheer number of CRM solutions available can be overwhelming, and it may be tempting to ignore paid products in favour of the free options. But if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Here are some of the factors you should consider before selecting a CRM solution for your organization, whether free or paid.

Not so free after all

Most free CRM solutions offer basic functionality, allowing you to manage marketing, sales, and customer service. This may be all your organization needs for the moment, but as more advanced features are usually paid, keep in mind that you will likely have to pay for additional functionality, such as marketing automation or advanced data analysis. As your business grows and your needs evolve, you may find paying just as much in the long run, if not more.

Before implementing any new solution, it’s important to analyze your current needs, and also to have a long-term vision of your business. Think about how quickly you may need these additional features, and consider how pushing back their implementation at a later time may end up causing more disruption in terms of change management, configuration time, and data migration.

Think long term

For this reason, settling for a free option may not be the smarter move in the long run, as you may find yourself chafing under the constraints and limited functionality sooner rather than later. Even paid CRM solutions are flexible and versatile, and offer different pricing plans to meet various needs and budgets. An implementation specialist can help you figure out the different pricing structures and select the best option to meet your current and long-term needs.

Moreover, the process of selecting and implementing a new solution is a substantial investment of both time and money, not to mention the change management and disruptions of normal operations result from the implementation. It may be better in the long run to adopt the solution that best meets your organization’s needs right off the bat rather than settling for the cheapest option and having to replace it later.

Look for expert guidance

Free CRM solutions are also designed to respond the needs of as many businesses as possible. If you have any specific needs, it may be difficult to find the features you are looking for, not to mention that you won’t have the guidance of a professional implementation partner. This is why we recommend looking for a CRM partner in your industry, who will be familiar with your processes and realities, and make recommendations based on your long-term vision, budget and current environment.

A wide variety of CRM solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement are available, each offering different functionalities and price points to meet the needs of various businesses. While these may not be free, you may also be able to start off with a customer relationship management solution that is less expensive than you might think.

By JOVACO Solutions, Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementation specialist in Quebec

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What Is Account-Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

November 7, 2019   CRM News and Info

by Helen Veyna

Last updated November 5, 2019

Those of us who are familiar with the sales cycle know that there is usually more than one stakeholder involved in the decision-making process, especially when there’s a significant sum of money at stake. What this means for marketers is that you are likely to encounter multiple personas with varying interests and will have to do your best to engage and persuade each of these individuals. As you can imagine, the amount of work and attention to detail involved in trying to keep multiple contacts moving through the sales funnel can become chaotic and overwhelming.

ABM Hero What Is Account Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

In these instances, having an account-based marketing approach can significantly improve marketers’ ability to effectively and efficiently nurture multiple stakeholders at an organization. This approach requires marketers to move beyond targeting individuals to a more holistic approach that enables them to nurture an organization as a whole and focus their efforts on better and larger opportunities.

But, before we go into more depth about the benefits of account-based marketing, let’s clearly define what it is. 

What Is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy in which organizations market to target accounts with personalized campaigns and messages that resonate with the collective needs and pain points of various stakeholders. This approach is effective because it allows marketers to tailor the way they approach these organizations based on an aggregated view of how key stakeholders are interacting with their marketing efforts. 

But why is this approach so effective? As we’ve already established, organizations are actively trying to involve key leaders and team members in the buying process to ensure that they are investing in a solution that best fits their needs and will generate a significant ROI. This creates a challenge for marketers who not only have to engage and nurture each of these individuals but also track their engagement to determine where the account stands as a whole and whether this opportunity is worth the time and effort of their sales teams.

Account-based marketing strives to alleviate this obstacle by enabling you to gain a holistic view of an organization’s pain points, interests, and concerns as reflected by the activity and engagement of its various stakeholders. Having access to the full picture allows you to identify your champions and detractors and also develop a marketing strategy that aims to generate enthusiasm for your brand among all key stakeholders regardless of where they currently stand.

Copy of Hows it going  Email banner 5 What Is Account Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

But this only begins to cover the advantages that stem from adopting an account-based marketing approach. Today we’re outlining 3 key benefits your organization can reap from implementing ABM strategies. 

1. Improve Your Ability to Gauge When an Account Is Ready to Buy

During the sales cycle, you will probably encounter individuals who are “champions” for your solution and would jump at the opportunity to give you their business if the decision were up to them. These individuals are very engaged with your messaging, and their activity and lead score tells you that they are more than qualified to talk to sales — but their enthusiasm doesn’t tell the entire story. 

Analyzing behavior on the individual level instead of across an organization is challenging because it doesn’t allow you to see where the entire buying team stands as a whole. For instance, one person’s enthusiasm could lead you to believe that the organization is ready to buy even if not all stakeholders are on the same page. Account-based marketing removes this obstacle by allowing you to gain a sense of the bigger picture and improving your ability to gauge the most appropriate time to transfer an opportunity to Sales. 

With an account-based marketing approach, you’re still tracking the way individuals are engaging with your marketing efforts, but you’re using these insights to inform your perspective of the account as a whole. Now, many of us know how difficult it is to collect data to begin with, let alone aggregate and analyze. Accomplishing this task, however, becomes much easier when you’re using a marketing automation platform. Act-On has an accounts dashboard that allows you to consolidate and view key information and buyer activity in one location.


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Using account-based scoring in addition to aggregating data can further improve your ability to determine when a lead is qualified. Using account-based scoring allows you to assign points to each customer action (such as downloading an eBook or viewing a web page) and define a threshold that tells you when a lead is qualified and ready to talk to Sales. This tactic not only allows you to measure behavior and engagement across an organization, it also enables your sales team to focus on more qualified and profitable opportunities. 

2. Nurture Your Detractors to Make Everybody a Champion for Your Organization

As we’ve already mentioned, it is highly likely that opinions will vary among different stakeholders at an organization. While you will have stakeholders that are extremely enthusiastic about what you have to offer and be quick to see your value, others will need your marketing team to pay them a little extra attention before they come around.  

This is another area where account-based marketing is extremely helpful. By looking at how various stakeholders are engaging with your website, emails, and marketing as a whole, you can more easily identify your champions and detractors. This information is extremely important to your success because it allows you to see which efforts are working and which are not, as well as pinpoint the individuals you’ll need to sway in order to finalize a sale.

Once you know who your detractors are, a good plan of action is to segment these contacts based on their interests and priorities and enter them into personalized automated nurture campaigns. This way you can deliver messaging and information that speaks to their specific pain points, interests, and questions to persuade them to become fans of your brand and help them make a final decision. 

By identifying roadblocks that are preventing stakeholders from seeing the value of your product or solution early on, you’ll be able to deliver more qualified and enthusiastic leads to members of your sales team. 

Do keep in mind, however, that paying extra attention to your detractors doesn’t mean you can get away with ignoring stakeholders who are enthusiastic about what you do. You should keep engaging with your champions in order to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page once the time to talk to Sales comes around.

ABM Banner What Is Account Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

3. Help Your Sales Team Seal the Deal

Speaking of closing deals, ABM can be just as useful to members of your sales team as it is to your marketing team — for many reasons. To start, when you transfer more qualified and enthusiastic opportunities to your salespeople, you improve their chance of gaining that final conversion and making a sale. 

One thing to note, however, is that a qualified lead doesn’t necessarily translate into a sales conversion. Nothing is worse for your salespeople than going into a phone call not being prepared to answer difficult questions regarding your qualified lead’s concerns and pain points. 

When the time comes to make that call, your salespeople have to be equipped with the right information to make their case, and that’s where having a holistic view of the challenges and sentiments across an organization comes in handy. Equipping your salespeople with insights about who they’re talking to, what they care about, and how they’ve engaged with your marketing campaigns and materials will prepare them for more productive conversations that leave lasting impressions.

If marketing and sales alignment is a challenge for your organization, a marketing automation that integrates with your CRM can help you improve collaboration. Integrating your marketing automation with a CRM system allows you to set up alerts that notify your sales team when a lead becomes qualified and facilitate the transfer of important information.

The Right Tool Can Help You Easily Implement, Launch, and Refine Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Developing and implementing an account-based marketing strategy can seem like a huge endeavor, but with the proper tools, it doesn’t have to be. A marketing automation platform like Act-On can provide all the tools you need to build engaging campaigns, measure engagement, consolidate insights, and test and refine your efforts. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Act-On can help you enhance your marketing strategy as a whole, we invite you to schedule a demo with one of our experts.

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Weaving Business Intelligence into the fabric of the organization with Microsoft Power BI

November 5, 2019   Self-Service BI

Our customers recognize that in today’s digital economy, data is everywhere – enabling every single employee in their organization to harness the power of all of that data is critical to their competitive advantage.

The Power BI team has a single goal: to enable organizations to embrace a data culture by allowing everyone to make data-driven decisions through beautiful, friendly, and easy to use analytics.

As we kickoff Ignite in Orlando this week, I’m really excited to announce a set of new capabilities in Power BI that help our customers weave business intelligence deep into the fabric of their organizations.

World-class Microsoft security capabilities help protect data

Power BI plays a key role in bringing data insights to everyone in an organization. However, as data becomes more accessible to inform decisions, risk of accidental oversharing or misuse of business-critical information can increase.

Microsoft has world-class security capabilities to help protect customers from threats. Over 3,500 security researchers along with sophisticated AI models reason every day over 6.5+ trillion signals globally to help protect customers against threats at Microsoft.

We are excited to announce new data protection capabilities in Power BI that build on Microsoft’s strengths in security and enable customers to empower every user with Power BI and better protect their data no matter how or where it is accessed.

  • Classify and label sensitive Power BI data using the familiar Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels used in Office.
  • Enforce governance policies even when Power BI content is exported to Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF, to help ensure data is protected even when it leaves Power BI.
  • Monitor and protect user activity on sensitive data in real time with alerts, session monitoring, and risk remediation using Microsoft Cloud App Security.
  • Empower security administrators who use data protection reports and security investigation capabilities with Microsoft Cloud App Security to enhance organizational oversight.
New protection metrics in the Power BI admin center

Now in public preview, the capabilities are engaged when Power BI is paired with Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security.

These updates, combined with the just announced data lineage view, show the strategic importance of incorporating Enterprise Information Management (EIM) capabilities into Power BI.

Power BI integrated with Azure Synapse Analytics and large models public preview

Today, Microsoft announced Azure Synapse Analytics, the next generation of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. With Azure Synapse, big data and SQL data professionals can collaborate, manage, and analyze your most important data with ease—all within the same service.

We’re excited to announce that Power BI is natively integrated into Azure Synapse Analytics.

  • Customers can link Power BI and Azure Synapse workspaces together providing them with a single pane of glass to develop and manage their end to end analytics infrastructure.
  • BI professionals can create enterprise grade semantic models from the Synapse workspace through integration with Power BI Desktop – which helps customers define their KPIs and business logic, apply role based security, and provides a blazingly fast in-memory cache.
  • Customers can build Power BI reports directly from within the Synapse workspace and make these reports available to their end users.
Power BI integrated with Azure Synapse Analytics

We’re also announcing the availability today of the public preview of large in-memory semantic models. As customers work with massive data volumes they will be able to create data models that go up to 400GB of compressed data, taking advantage of all the memory they have in their Power BI Premium capacity. This increase in model sizes unleashes endless possibilities for enterprise models and in conjunction with certified and promoted datasets, enables organization to have one, enterprise-grade version of the truth.

New AI driven augmented analytics and machine learning experiences

Power BI is a pioneer when it comes to bringing AI experiences into business intelligence with capabilities that empower end users, business analysts, and data scientists. Today we are announcing new experiences directly built into Power BI and Power BI Premium with no additional purchase necessary.

Decomposition Tree

Our community voted and we’ve acted – the decomposition tree idea has over 4,500 votes on ideas.powerbi.com. We are super excited to announce the preview of the decomposition tree visual will ship in the November Power BI Desktop release next week. This visual helps users understand the root cause that contributes to a high or low KPI value broken down by one or more dimensions. The AI component of the decomposition tree is the choice to automatically find the most interesting splits and conduct the root cause analysis for you, instead of splitting manually by dimensions.

The new decomposition tree visual in action

Automated ML General Availability

Last week, Automated ML in Power BI was made generally available. With Automated ML, business analysts can build machine learning models to solve business problems that once required data scientist skillsets. Power BI automates most of the data science workflow to create the ML models, all while providing you full visibility into the process.

The Automated ML model selection screen in Power BI

Cognitive Services in Power BI Desktop (Preview)

The integration with Azure Cognitive Services allows users to better engage with unstructured data by detecting language, scoring sentiment, extracting key phrases, and identifying objects in images. Cognitive Services is available today in Power BI Premium and can be accessed from Power BI dataflows. As of next week, these capabilities will accessible directly from Power BI Desktop.

Cognitive Services menu in the Power BI Desktop Query Editor

Power BI integrated more deeply than ever with Microsoft Teams

Effortless communication using data enables everyone to make fast and accurate decisions. Today, we’re excited to announce deeper integrations with Microsoft Teams are coming soon. They’ll help your organization harness data effectively as individuals work together to achieve shared goals.

  • Starting in late 2019, we will ship a new tab for Microsoft Teams that supports the new workspace experience and reports in organizational apps. This gives all your team members access to data without leaving Microsoft Teams
  • In 2020 we’ll go further by releasing rich previews of Power BI reports directly within Teams channels and chats. We’ll include action button so everyone can quickly act on the data.
Teams and Power BI new experiences for cards and tabs

SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services and Reporting Services

With the general availability announcement of SQL Server 2019, SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services and Reporting Services are now generally available. This release is packed full of new features for both products, including calculation groups in SSAS for calculation reusability, governance settings to protect server resources, and enhanced accessibility options for SSRS. The full list of features in the SQL Server 2019 release, including those for both SSRS and SSAS, are available in the What’s New in SQL Server 2019 documentation online.

See you at Ignite!

With all these exciting innovations, the Power BI team and I are looking forward to seeing many of our customers and community members at Ignite this week. If you are attending Ignite, please attend the “Microsoft Power BI: Business intelligence strategy, vision, and roadmap update”. You can find the full set of Power BI sessions here.

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Announcing custom branding for your organization

August 21, 2019   Self-Service BI

To establish data-driven cultures, organizations around the world leverage Power BI for their large-scale BI deployments. Empowering tens of thousands of people with reliable data is no easy feat. IT departments and BI teams bear the responsibility of delivering a solution where people feel safe and confident exploring insights. Consistent branding and corporate representation earn the trust of the people in your organization using Power BI.

Today, I am thrilled to announce the release of custom branding for the Power BI service. Now you can change the look and feel of the Power BI service to match your corporate theme with just a few clicks!

Custom branding lets you change the theme color that appears in the top navigation bar, add your company logo, and bring your default landing page to life by adding a cover image. Sound exciting? Read on for a walkthrough. Or, head over to the admin portal to try it out for yourself.
 

Note: We are starting to roll out the feature to tenants this week. It should be enabled worldwide by August 27, 2019.

Branding your Power BI service

To get started, open the Power BI admin portal, and select the Custom branding tab in the left navigation.

On this page, you can configure the following elements:

  1. Logo: Upload a logo for your organization. The logo will appear in the top left of the navigation bar that appears on every page. The image must be under 10 KB and least 200 x 30 pixels in size.
  2. Cover image: Upload a cover image that gets featured on top of Home. The image must be under 1 MB and ideally 1920 x 160 pixels in size. We’ve also added an option for you to crop your cover image within the service.
  3. Theme color: Select a color to use for the background of the top navigation bar that appears on every page. By default, the theme color is set to Power BI’s original color. We recommend that you choose something that complements your logo or resembles other portals (e.g. other Office 365 sites) within your organization.

Once you have configured your branding elements, you can see a quick preview of how this will look on Home by selecting the Preview button. It’s always better to get a glimpse of your artwork before deploying it to thousands of people!

Here’s an example of organizational branding being configured for Contoso:

 Announcing custom branding for your organization

And that’s it! Once you’re happy with your custom branding configuration, select Publish. Everyone in your organization will see the new Power BI service branding right away. Refresh your browser to see it in action.
 

Best practices

When choosing a Logo, we recommend using an PNG file type wherever possible so that your logo will have a high-resolution appearance on all screens and at all zoom levels.

When choosing a Theme color for the top navigation, choose a color that has a high contrast ratio with the logo you picked. The recommended contrast ratio between logo and theme color is 4.5:1.

When choosing a Cover image, put on your Picasso hat and get creative! We recommend that you choose something that complements the theme color you chose and provides a welcoming feel. To ensure the cover image scales to various resolutions and screen sizes, we recommend you choose an image that has a large width, 2000 pixels or higher, and a fixed height of 160 pixels.
 

FAQ

Can I configure the theme of the left navigation?

No, the left navigation can’t be configured. As soon as you apply your corporate branding, the left navigation will be light-themed by default. You will notice that the accent color of the “French fry” matches your theme color.

Will it work with the new look?

Yes, custom branding will be supported in the old and new look. It should not impact any feature or functionality.

How do I revert to the default Power BI colors?

There’s an option to remove custom branding on the custom branding page in the admin portal. Select that and publish to reset your Power BI service to the default colors.

How does this work with B2B?

One of the added benefits of having your own custom branding for your organization is that it will help you quickly distinguish the tenant you are viewing the report in for B2B scenarios. Please note that we will not be supporting branding for B2B users in sovereign clouds for the initial release.
 

Next steps

  • Try out the feature! Head on over to the admin portal and start to plan out how you want to customize the Power BI service to match your corporate brand. You can use the Preview functionality to try out various configurations and choose the best one
  • We are also planning on bringing this functionality to Power BI mobile – hang tight and keep an eye out on the blogs in the upcoming weeks
  • Have comments? Want to share your cool branding? We’d love to see it! Please leave comments below or in the community forums
  • Have ideas for where we should take the feature? Create new ideas or vote on existing ones in UserVoice

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An Outcome-Driven Enterprise Data Strategy: Organization And Governance

May 31, 2019   BI News and Info

Part 2 in the 5-part Enterprise Data Strategy series, which explores the importance of leadership and accountability in directing an overall data strategy tied to business outcomes.

If “data is the new soil” (as the data journalist David McCandless said), then organizational structure and governance are the irrigation of an outcome-driven enterprise data strategy. Both are essential for building a solid strategy and effectively managing your most critical enterprise data. And in a time when organizations increasingly depend on data for every aspect of their business, you can’t afford not to have an information game plan.

In Part 1 of this series, Tina Rosario and I explored why an enterprise data strategy was important, what it looks like, and what the key elements are. In this post, I’ll dive into the organization and governance component. We all know these words, but in the context of an outcome-driven enterprise data strategy, what do they really mean?

Organization and governance lay the foundation for all other aspects of a data strategy (hence the irrigation analogy) and define:

  • Data scope: master, transactional, operational, analytical, big data, etc.
  • Organizational structure: roles and responsibilities between accountable owner, head of data, IT, business team, and executive sponsor
  • Data standards and policies: guideposts that outline what you’re managing and governing and to what outcome
  • Oversight and metrics: parameters for measuring strategy execution and success
blog 1 figure 2 An Outcome Driven Enterprise Data Strategy: Organization And Governance

Why are organization and governance important?

In the Big Data and AI Executive Survey 2019 by NewVantage Partners, only 7.5% of respondents cited technology as the roadblock to becoming data-driven. Conversely, 93% of them listed people and processes as a critical obstacle to adoption, along with lack of organizational alignment (40.3%) and cultural resistance (24%).

Every business transformation requires accountable roles and responsibilities with a champion to lead the change. It also requires a culture shift from viewing data management as a boring low-level job to one of extreme importance. If employees touch data – especially critical data – and if they create it, change it, use it, move it around in some way, they need to understand the role they play in properly maintaining that data and take accountability.

A business outcome-based enterprise data strategy helps drive that culture shift because it communicates broadly – in simple business terms – what data matters most. It changes the perception that data is a back-office job of little importance to one that is tied to successful business outcomes. And the organization and governance component of the strategy defines the who (critical roles); what (change management needed, including how to measure accountability); and how (roadmap) of achieving your goal.

This is also where you define the data standards and policies for data quality, architecture, security/privacy/ethics, and CRUD (create, read, update, and delete), to name a few. These guideposts are then used to define how you’ll execute in each of the other areas of your strategy, like detailing the process for how data is created to these standards.

What are the keys to success?

Everything under organization and governance is key (that all-important irrigation), so let’s focus on what’s often overlooked when building organization and governance:

  1. Defining a reasonable, targeted scope: You’ll always have more data work than budget and resources can cover. It’s a fact of business life in today’s data-rich world. Hence, scoping a realistic, doable roadmap – along with what will not be covered – is crucial. And make sure to do the scoping and expectation-setting in partnership with your business executive sponsor. Don’t do it alone.
  1. Securing a business executive sponsor: You need a leader to visibly champion the data strategy and actively advocate and communicate the strategy to the broader organization. The sponsor enforces accountability, models the desired data mindset, and helps arbitrate data issues between business units. And guess what? You can have more than one executive sponsor, creating a “Friends of Data” circle, further facilitating that culture shift.
  1. Defining business value metrics: Establishing how to measure and communicate the value of your data strategy – in business terms – helps ensure business engagement, commitment, and ongoing funding.

How do you get started?

Data transformation happens when an organization understands the value of data, the role it plays in making business decisions, and the importance of tying the data strategy to business outcomes. After all, you can’t have an outcome-driven enterprise data strategy without a business outcome.

  1. Prioritize which business outcome is most important (If you don’t have defined business outcomes, do that first.)
  1. Do the three steps outlined under keys to success, starting with securing a business executive sponsor
  1. Go after some quick wins first to establish credibility and validate the program, such as data-quality cleansing of the critical data that’s required or establishing dashboards that improve visibility
  1. Don’t forget the need for a culture shift

And of course, read the posts in the “Enterprise Data Strategy” series.

For more information

  • Gain a better understanding of your current organizational maturity with SAP’s executive-focused, next-generation Database and Data Management Assessment, which is based on top KPIs and best practices. Click on “Start Survey” and proceed to register.
  • Reach out to us (Maria for North America and Tina for everywhere else) to inquire about a 1:1 enterprise data strategy discussion

And please join our “Pathways to the Intelligent Enterprise” Webinar Tuesday, June 11, featuring Phil Carter, chief analyst at IDC, and SAP’s Dan Kearnan and Ginger Gatling. Register here.

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