Tag Archives: This
this is far better happy talk: “What we need is more ‘economic intercourse'”
Giggling RWNJs seized on a Biden comment that only reveals how much context will be needed with an IMPOTUS who’s a pathological liar.
For example, Trump lied again today:
Better, not more
President Trump’s first tweet Sunday came unusually late, popping up a few minutes after noon — hours behind schedule for a president who is often awake and tweeting as the sun rises.
“Happy Birthday to Melania, our great First Lady!” Trump tweeted at 12:06 p.m.
The celebratory tweet kicked off a long day of tweeting and retweeting that really ramped up at around 2 p.m. when Trump observed, in response to a recent New York Times article, that those who know him regard him as “the hardest working President in history.”
Over the next seven hours or so, Trump took aim at everything and anyone he could, unleashing a barrage of more than two dozen tweets and retweets that targeted media outlets, high-profile commentators and hosts, and Democrats.
He also returned once more to the Russia probe and impeachment, promoting a tweet that accused his political adversaries of “three failed coup attempts.” The tweet went on to suggest with no evidence that the president’s opponents could “attempt to steal the election” by making the novel coronavirus’s impact on human lives seem worse than it really is.
Speed Up Decisions To Steer The Ship Through This Time Of Unprecedented Disruption
The current business and social climate has created unforeseen challenges for enterprises of all shapes and sizes. The disruptions, both internally and externally, are unprecedented in modern times. Within the enterprise, the CFO and the finance office arguably face some of the greatest pressures to steer the enterprise in the right direction.
Uncertainties and choices to be made
At this time, there are many uncertainties that must be navigated by CFOs and specifically the financial planning & analysis (FP&A) professionals on their teams. The choices are many and include:
- Impact on revenue with disruption within sales channels
- Cash flow position and liquidity management
- Expense management and cost containment
- Best-case earnings projections and guidance based on what’s known of the unknown
These choices don’t just come to the FP&A domain in a singular form, but as a collection of issues and choices to be addressed holistically. Should we tap into a line of credit to keep our working capital fluid? Will our current cash flow and liquidity allow us to cover short-term expenses and current and future capital initiatives? Can we take advantage of government programs with employee salary assistance? What do we tell our shareholders for balance-of-year projections? Are there opportunities available to assist our customers to succeed?
These issues are faced not only by finance but rather across the enterprise as different groups examine their budgets and potential tactics. Does marketing continue with current programs? Does the supply chain face disruptions? What is the effect on demand plans? What does human resources propose for the current headcount levels, and how does that affect outputs? All these individual budgets and models need to be brought together in a single view to enable understanding of the interdependencies.
Collaborative enterprise planning to break down silos
These challenges can easily be addressed by a modern planning paradigm: collaborative enterprise planning. Collaborative enterprise planning involves breaking down silos, allowing plans of all sorts to be linked instantaneously. This way, finance can get the true picture of current fiscal health to advise the best-case scenarios and steer away from poor ones. For example, finance can evaluate a sales plan’s impact on marketing campaigns, or link a reconciled S&OP process to a financial plan. An analyst can determine what headcount plans might impact employee productivity and cash positions.
Finance also needs to be in a position to make decisions quickly. With collaborative enterprise planning, the finance function can move away from scheduled plans. Today, it is no longer tenable to work in an environment where worst-in-class finance departments delay decisions because they are beholden to spreadsheets or outmoded planning tools. Rather, with the right technology on hand, they can simulate the impact of multiple scenarios immediately. They can use modern analytics complemented with predictive analytics and machine learning to support the recommended and best-case outcomes. Dashboards and built-in visualization allow for real-time reporting and an aesthetically pleasing experience for the end users with minimum chance of errors – unlike spreadsheets.
Instant discussion for fast decision-making
Finally, most organizations, including finance, are no longer working within four walls, but rather in a virtual capacity. Collaborative enterprise planning promotes instant discussion during planning and forecasts. Geo-political issues have made an extraordinary impact on commodity prices; this, along with pandemic-related issues, requires collaboration on the fly and consensus on the go. Decisions must be made immediately, not dependent on meetings, voice mails, and email threads.
With collaborative enterprise planning, finance departments can lead their enterprise to the best possible outcome and better results to navigate properly through these trying times. Collaborative enterprise planning enables finance to learn from all aspects of the organization, recommend and evaluate multiple scenarios, make the right decisions – and truly step up to be leaders in the enterprise.
For more information read this report from Ventana Research, “Collaborative Enterprise Planning: Improving the Business Value of Planning and Budgeting across the Enterprise.”
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Evaluating BI and Analytics Platforms? This Analyst Report Can Help
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Companies are awash in data, and yet still struggle to turn that data into the insights needed to improve operations, better serve their customers, and innovate for the future. We think that two recent reports from Gartner can help you assess what’s needed for insights-driven digital transformation.
The latest Gartner Critical Capabilities for BI and Analytics report scored 20 vendors across seven different use cases:
- Advanced Analytics
- Visual Self-Service Analytics
- Enterprise Analytics
- General Analytics
- Embedded Analytics
- Augmented Analytics
- Cloud Analytics
TIBCO Software received the highest score for both Advanced Analytics as well as Visual Self-Service Analytics.
We believe the latest Critical Capabilities report, combined with the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms, will give you a robust picture of Gartner’s view. In the latter, TIBCO Software was named a Challenger by Gartner Research. We believe this report validates what our customers have been saying: Spotfire continues to evolve across a full range of use cases—from self-service visual analytics to advanced applications—to help enterprises solve their toughest business challenges.
Get the analytics vendor perspective you need. Download the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms today.
(Sources: Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, Feb 11, 2020, James Richardson, Rita Sallam, Kurt Schlegel, Austin Kronz, Julian Sun; Critical Capabilities for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, Kurt Schlegel, James Richardson, Rita Sallam, Austin Kronz, Julian Sun, 17 March 2020)
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.
wadebae: are we memeing this?
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How To Apply This Year’s Top Data & Analytics Trends to Your Business
Reading Time: 3 minutes
As we know, with the start of a new year comes a slew of fresh data and analytics trends that businesses can apply to boost customer intimacy, operational excellence, and business reinvention. The data and analytics trends predicted for 2020 will have significant disruptive potential over the next three to five years, so it’s key that your business takes advantage of them this year for maximum digital transformation potential.
Without further ado, here are Gartner’s top 10 data and analytics trends for 2020 and how you can apply them to your business.
Augmented analytics
Augmented analytics automates finding and surfacing the most important insights or changes in the business to optimize decision making, in a fraction of the time. It makes insights available to all business roles; however, it does require increased data literacy across the organization. This year, augmented analytics will be the driver of analytics and business intelligence purchases in addition to data science and machine learning platforms.
Read this eBook to learn about the different types of augmented analytics and when to apply each.
Augmented data management
Organizations are continually on the hunt to automate data management tasks by adding machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to make the process self-configuring and self-tuning. This enables highly-skilled technical staff to focus on higher-value tasks. All enterprise data management categories are affected, including data quality, metadata, master data, and more.
Tune into this webinar to learn how you can unify all of your different data types.
Natural language processing (NLP) and conversational analytics
NLP gives businesses an easier way to ask questions about data and receive an explanation of the insights. Conversational analytics takes the concept of NLP a step further by enabling questions to be asked and answered verbally. By next year, NLP and conversational analytics will boost analytics adoption by employees to over 50 percent.
Empower business users to self-serve insights though simple, real language requests.
Graph analytics
With the growth of structured and unstructured data, analyzing it at scale is not possible using traditional query tools. Graph analytics is a set of analytic techniques that show how entities such as people, places, and things are related to one another. The application of graph processing and graph databases are predicted to grow at 100 percent annually over the next few years to accelerate data preparation and enable more complex and adaptive data science.
Leverage the power of relationships to solve connectivity problems at scale.
Commercial AI and ML
Open-source platforms for AI and ML have been the primary source of innovation in algorithms and development environments. While commercial vendors were slow to respond, they now provide connectors, offering enterprise features necessary to scale AI and ML, such as project and model management, reuse, transparency, and integration.
Watch this webinar to learn how you can drive digital transformation with AI and ML.
Data fabric
In order to derive the most value from your analytics, you need to have an agile and trusted data fabric, a custom-made design that provides reusable data services, pipelines, semantic tiers, or APIs via a combination of data integration. This enables frictionless access and sharing of data in a distributed environment.
Learn how you can provide an agile data infrastructure that unifies your data with a data fabric solution.
Explainable AI
“Black box” AI and algorithmic bias can pose risks to an organization. With explainable AI, you can increase the transparency and trustworthiness of AI solutions and outcomes, and reduce regulatory and reputational risk. It is the set of capabilities that describe a model while highlighting its strengths and weaknesses, predicts its likely behavior, and identifies any potential bias.
Accelerate your analytics journey with the application of explainable AI.
Blockchain in data and analytics
Blockchain technologies help address two challenges: lineage of assets and transactions, and transparency for complex networks of participants. However, since blockchain hasn’t yet matured to real-world, production-level scalability beyond cryptocurrency, it needs to work with additional systems to act as a system of record.
Untap the potential of blockchain technology to make your business truly digital.
Continuous intelligence
Organizations have sought out real-time intelligence. Now, they are finally able to implement these systems using continuous intelligence. Cloud, advances in streaming software, and the explosive growth of data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors makes this possible. It is projected that by 2022, more than half of major new business systems will incorporate continuous intelligence that uses real-time context data to improve decisions.
Watch this webinar to learn how you can implement continuous intelligence in your organization.
Persistent memory servers
Persistent memory technology will help businesses extract more actionable insights from data. Right now, most database management systems (DBMS) make use of in-memory database structures. However, with data volumes growing rapidly, memory size can be restrictive. To keep up, they need faster performance, massive memory, and faster storage. Many DBMS providers are experimenting with persistent memory, though it may take several years to perfect.
Avoid exhausting available memory in your servers with these best practices.
So what are you waiting for? Apply these 2020 trends to your business today to continue to tap the power of your data to innovate, collaborate, and grow.
Will Trump be hanging copies of this fake “Time magazine cover” at his golf resorts
In the tradition of Trump putting fake Time magazine covers of his face in his golf resorts, his campaign decided to indulge their propaganda jones. Trump also tried to bully Thunberg in a tweet today.
President Trump‘s reelection campaign on Thursday tweeted an edited cover of Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” issue that depicted the president’s head on the shoulders of Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate change activist.
The tweet, sent Thursday morning, suggested that the magazine had erred in naming Thunberg Person of the Year and listed accomplishments of the administration.
[…]
Time magazine announced Thunberg its Person of the Year on Wednesday, citing the activist’s inspiration of school strikes and marches around the world in support of action against climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. The selection was widely praised, including by Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton.
HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN?
While studying the third century items, archaeologists found four very fragile birds eggs from the period – three of them broke releasing a ‘potent stench of rotten egg’.
The remaining egg is the only complete object of its kind discovered in the UK and was likely preserved as a result of being placed in a waterlogged pit.
The nine year long dig was on the Barryfields housing development site near Aylesbury next to the site of the Roman village of Fleet Marston.
Edward Biddulph, from Oxford Archaeology told the BBC people of the time would throw objects into the pit for good luck ‘much like a wishing well’.
He described it as a ‘remarkable collection’ of organic materials including leather shoes, wooden tools and a very rare basket.
In Roman society eggs symbolised fertility and rebirth and eggshells have been found in other UK Roman sites before – but never a complete egg.
The team behind the discovery believe that the eggs and the basket may have been placed in the waterlogged pit as food offerings in a religious ceremony.
The discovery has been described as ‘exceptional’ by researchers, who say the eggs were a ‘truly remarkable find’.
They were found on a site that borders the Roman road of Akeman Street and is next to the Roman town of Fleet Marston.
Oxford Archaology, who are due to publish a book on the findings at the Berryfields site, say the discoveries have helped create a clearer picture of life in Roman Fleet Marston and surrounding villages.
Researchers have been studying the items uncovered between 2007 and 2016 for the past three years.
They found a range of artefacts and environmental evidence including timbers, organic materials and pottery that highlight details of life in the area.
It’s thought the timber piles supported a bridge that carried the Roman road of Akeman Street over the River Thame.
Researchers say the findings from the dig highlights the importance of livestock, especially horses, to the middle Iron Age and Roman economies.
They say that it sheds light on the character of Roman Fleet Marston which had previously only been understood from incidental finds.
‘Evidence from Berryfields and other sites in the area shows that over time, Fleet Marston found itself at the intersection of several route ways that took travellers into the countryside and on to major towns.’
The team say this put it in an important position as a crossroads for life in the late Roman-era Britain.
“Together with hundreds of coins and other finds [found at other digs], this potentially identifies the settlement as a market-place or administrative centre with extensive trade connections.
‘A role that would be continued in nearby Aylesbury in the medieval period and to the present day.’
This Holiday Season, Be Thankful For A Great Customer Experience
Is it just me or has Black Friday turned into Black November?
Before the pumpkins rotted, before Halloween candy was devoured, before the ghosts and ghouls were put back in the attic, we were already deluged with Black Friday adverts and mailers.
Of course, this onslaught of promotion is entirely predictable. The fact is, no retailer can afford to sit out Black Friday – not when it’s the day that pulls them out of the red (in accounting terms) and into the black. For retailers, Black Friday can literally make their year.
More than a day
Traditionally, we think of Black Friday as the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States – when throngs of people flock to the malls. Increasingly, though, the term is being broadened to refer to the full five-day period that starts with Thanksgiving Day and runs through Cyber Monday.
The cyber part of the extended Black Friday shopping weekend continues to show its strength. Yes, you can still expect jammed parking lots at your mall of choice, but by some estimates at least, brick and mortar store shopping on Black Friday was slightly down last year. On the other hand, online sales for Black Friday more than compensated, jumping 23.6% from 2017 to hit $ 6.2 billion.
Indeed, online sales now must be seen as the main show for the Black Friday weekend. Take Cyber Monday, for example. Once the laggard in terms of sales, Cyber Monday won the weekend in 2018 with a $ 7.9 billion haul that weighed in as the highest U.S. e-commerce sales day in history.
The idea of Black Friday (or something akin to it) is not exclusive to the US, of course. In the UK, shoppers spent £8.29 billion during the Black Friday weekend. In France, they spent £5.99 billion.
Neither is it limited to Christmas. In China, the big shopping day comes on Singles Day – which is sort of like Valentine’s Day on steroids. This year, Singles Day broke records again, raking in $ 38.4 billion. Reportedly, Alibaba reached $ 1 billion in sales in its first 68 seconds and $ 13 billion in its first hour!
Toward thankful customers
So yes, there is a lot at stake for shopping days (or weekends) like Black Friday. But let’s remember that here in the US it all starts with Thanksgiving, which isn’t about shopping but about … well, giving thanks.
Thankfulness is a powerful human emotion, and companies that can engender it in their customers are likely to keep those customers over the long term. But how do you move forward? It all comes down to delivering a great customer experience.
Keep in mind, though, that a great customer experience doesn’t end when you place the order. In fact, it doesn’t even start there. Great customer experiences are woven into the entire end-to-end process of designing, making, and delivering the products you sell.
Companies should create experiences that make their customers want to say thank you in the following ways:
Thanks for thinking of me with a great design experience:
Great customer experiences start by designing and manufacturing products that the customer actually wants. What a concept! But understanding what customers want can be difficult. Leading companies are mixing data from sales and social media with advanced analytics and machine learning to detect shifts in demand patterns and customer preferences. To meet these preferences, companies are also designing highly configurable products that make it easier to make exactly what customers want.
Thanks for making it easy for me with a great ordering experience:
With so much of sales shifting online, companies need to find ways to make ordering as simple as possible. This starts with understanding who the customer actually is, remembering their past interactions, and prepopulating ordering data as much as possible to make the checkout process painless. Nowhere is this more important than with mobile. Customers want tap-tap-buy capabilities on their phones – and customers who get it will keep coming back.
Thanks for bringing it to me when and where I want it with a great delivery experience:
According to Adobe Analytics, 2018 saw a 73% increase in customers choosing the BIOPIS (buy online, pick up in store) option – with 64% making a further in-store purchase while picking up. So, what’s the downside of making it as easy as possible for customers to get what they want when they want it? I can’t see one. But to get there, companies need omnichannel visibility of customers, orders, inventory, availability logistics carriers, and more. Integration across all phases of operations is the key.
Thanks for remembering me with a great after-sales service experience:
Remaining attentive after the sale is critical for maintaining customer loyalty. Wherever possible, leading companies are using IoT sensors and greater connectedness in general to more effectively monitor usage data and post-sale customer experiences. Some companies are even using predictive analytics to detect issues before they arise – enabling them to take action ahead of time to ensure the best customer experiences possible.
So, when it comes to Black Friday or any other kind of high-stakes shopping day for retailers or manufacturers, keep in mind that thankfulness pays. If you can create experiences that make life easier for your customers, you may very well be showered with thankfulness expressed by your customers with their ongoing business.
Happy Thanksgiving and good luck on Black Friday.
Be thankful for a free whitepaper from IDC about how to drive a great customer experience from design of new products, through to their operation at a customer.