May 23rd, 2013
The world, and the businesses that run it, are becoming increasingly social. This has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of data available to us, thus making Business Intelligence (BI) more important than ever. One increasingly popular form of BI is the collection, analysis and use of social data. This is a relatively new idea that has many business owners and managers confused. Are you one of them?
Read more.
Business intelligence is the study of a company's data with the goal of enabling managers and owners to make better decisions. One section of business intelligence commonly talked about is business performance, more specifically the tool used to measure it - Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Do you know what KPIs are?
What exactly is data? Many define it as a set of values that belong to a set of items. Essentially, data is all around us, and we use it on a daily basis. Data, by itself is largely useless - think of the last time you saw a spreadsheet without any labels. But through the use of tools that help us analyze, interpret and manipulate data, we are able to turn it into something useful: Information. The question is, what are the useful data analysis tools?
Humans are generally visual creatures. We need to see something to believe it, or be able to digest and use it. For most companies wanting to gauge their performance and success, they need to analyze existing data. The problem is, data by itself is useless. It only becomes useful once it's collected and analyzed and presented in a way we can understand. For many businesses this is done through the use of dashboards.
The idea of big data is fairly new, but like almost every other big tech advancement, it's really taken off. Many popular tech sites and news outlets have focused on it in the past year and companies are enthusiastic to take advantage of it. Companies shouldn't be too eager however, as the idea and practice of big data is still unclear to many and could lead businesses to make costly mistakes.
One thing many managers are concentrating on this year is marketing. Marketing has been going through some pretty huge changes brought about by tech. It no longer works to just have a newspaper add. Now, marketing relies on tech to be successful, and to develop good marketing platforms you should be aware of possible tech related marketing trends will pop-up in the coming year.
The most common goal amongst most business owners and managers is to stay organized. One way in which this tidying up is evident is with emails. With the high amount of email we receive, our inboxes can become more than cluttered. This barrage of messages leads to users trying to reach the seemingly mythical 'Inbox 0'. Many users delete emails in hopes of reaching the elusive 0, something which can cause trouble in the future.
Clouds are a marvelously complex thing. We’re not talking about the fluffy white ones in the sky, we mean clouds of the tech variety. They are quickly becoming an integral part of business operations and will change the way we all conduct business. Coincidentally, as the cloud picks up steam, we will need to upgrade our computers to keep up with the changes, but the next upgrade may be a bit different from the last.
Are you thinking of adopting a cloud based service or program? If yes, it’s a sure chance that you are aware of recent highly publicized issues in the media. These issues present a risk to the cloud, one that may turn businesses away from it. We aren’t going to deny the risk with any cloud solution, as every action has risk associated with it. For a cloud solution to be successful, managers need to know how to manage the risk associated with using the cloud.
If you were to visualize the relationships between different industries and companies it would probably look like a giant web of interconnected nodes linked to each other. Indeed, almost every company relies on other companies to operate, and these companies in turn rely on others. One of biggest relationships in this model is between companies and the Information Technology (IT) industry. The IT industry is no doubt important, and a new report highlights the importance of IT as well as its forecasted growth.
