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Big Data: Trends in the Education Sector

Our recent blog article highlighted 6 things to keep in mind when optimizing Big Data for your company. An essential component highlighted by Michael Davison, co-founder and Editor-in-chief of True Interaction, is the understanding that data analytics provides AN answer, rather than THE answer.

This concept resonates in the education sector, with the U.S. Department of Education calling the use of student data systems to improve education a “national priority.” Teachers are inundated with data points that quantify formative assessment results, parent call logs, absences, time-on-task, observations and more. But as with any sector, what matters most in education is how you use data, rather than that you have it.

Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator, author and scholar, wrote:

“Despite all this new information and benefits that come with it, there are clear handicaps in how big data has been used in education reforms. In fact, pundits and policymakers often forget that Big data, at best, only reveals correlations between variables in education, not causality.”

Despite pronouncements such as this from key education reformers, in the ed-tech industry, big data and analytics are exceedingly prolific. A multitude of companies collect and analyze information on how students interact with digital content.

In the United States, almost all teachers (93 percent) use some form of digital tool to guide instruction. But more than two-thirds of teachers (67 percent) say they are not fully satisfied with the effectiveness of the data or the tools for working with data that they have access to (Gates Foundation, 2015).

The majority of school districts (70 percent) report having had an electronic student information system providing access to enrollment and attendance data for six or more years, and more recently, districts have begun acquiring electronic data systems:

– 79% report having an assessment system that organizes and analyzes benchmark assessment data

– 77% report having a data warehouse that provides access to current and historical data on students

– 64% report having an instructional or curriculum management system

Despite this proliferation in the use of data systems, the Gates Foundation found that there are additional barriers that prevent full implementation of data systems in schools.

Because of these barriers, teachers say data are often “siloed” and difficult to work with, inflexible, and unable to track student progress over time. How can school and district leaders optimize the data systems to impact student performance?

1. Involve teachers in data analysis.

Often, teachers are seen as the data “collectors” while school-based and district leaders are tasked with analysis, synthesis, and recommendations. This might contribute to the slow modification of classroom practices in response to data. With teachers left out of the data analysis, there is a significant barrier to classroom integration. It is important to recognize that in terms of promoting student growth, teachers know best the strategies and methods to employ. The disconnect between teachers and the top-down approach to data use in schools has created a false narrative that teachers are unmotivated and disinterested in employing data-driven instruction in their classrooms. In reality, 78 percent of teachers believe that data can validate where their students are and where they can go. District leaders and product developers can harness this desire to integrate data to provide customized solutions, tailored to grade level, content area, and demographics.

2. Invest in professional development of staff to integrate tools and practice.

Similar to our first recommendation, it is important that education leaders invest resources – financial, human capital, and time – to the development of teachers’ capacity to fully utilize and customize lessons based on student data.

Various research studies have found that those who participate in professional development programs that include coaching/mentoring are more likely to deploy new instructional strategies in the classroom. Effective professional development that truly enables teachers to integrate data systems is continuous and ongoing. Discrete training sessions to show teachers how to use specific hardware/software tools are important, but truly integrative professional development should go further by providing ongoing support and on-the-job training on how to collect/analyze data and how to adjust teaching in response to data analytics. Fishman (2006) noted that learning how to use technology is not the same as learning how to teach with technology.

3. Promote the use of personalized learning.

69 percent of teachers surveyed by the Gates Foundation believe that improving student achievement depends on tailoring instruction to meet individual students’ needs. Connecting data from multiple sources across a student’s academic, social, behavioral, and emotional experiences may help teachers gain a fuller picture of each student. Schools that adopt a learner‐centered pedagogy tend to experience greater integration and more effective use of technology in the classroom.

4. Work with product developers or vendors who can conduct full analysis of teachers’ needs when designing or optimizing data systems.

Over 60 percent of districts reported that lack of interoperability across data systems was a barrier to expanded use of data-driven decision making. True Interaction produces custom full-stack end-to-end technology solutions across web, desktop and mobile, integrating multiple data sources to create a customized data solution. True Interaction can determine the most optimal means to achieve operational perfection, devising and implementing the right tech stack to fit the specific school and or district need. True Interaction pulls together disparate data sources, fuses together disconnected silos, and does exactly what it takes for school data systems to operate with high levels of efficiency and efficacy, ultimately leading to improved student achievement outcomes.
Contact our team to learn more about how we can optimize your school or district data system.

Joe Sticca, Chief Operating Officer of True Interaction, contributed to this post.

by Jessica Beidelman

5 Criteria for Prioritizing Business Optimization Projects in the Digital Space

“Going digital” – the globally pervasive term for the vague process of improving elements of your business with the fruit of new technology, such as advanced cloud-based analytics and machine learning solutions. Wireless communication is common these days, while cheap sensors, mobile devices, and other hardware enable businesses to direct and process oceans of data, manage people and equipment remotely, and boost the efficiency of field service personnel.

Clearly, digital can reshape any aspect of modern enterprise. Consider QM, an iPad application that True Interaction built for Lifetime Brands. QM enables organizations to oversee and manage Quality Control Inspections in real time, regardless of where factories, product lots, or distribution points are located. QM conducts multiple inspection types, including factories, products, and social compliance, powered by SAP cloud data.

I’ve written before regarding the huge gains reaped by progressive businesses in the digital space. The race is on, but where should you start? What aspect of the business should come first? Sales? Customer Service? Logistics? Procurement? Planning? Production? More importantly, how can business leaders prioritize their company’s improvement in the digital space?

Evaluation Criteria

Obviously, companies should select the most relevant and useful “digital solution” that creates the most value and/or best addresses gaps in productivity or performance, but this isn’t always clearly indicated. I have gathered 5 criteria that any “digital solution” should be evaluated against in order to aid you in establishing the priority of what needs to be done:

1. Business Case

Every idea on the table for implementation should have a well-developed business case – a justification for the proposed project or undertaking on the basis of its expected commercial benefit – such as the potential boost in sales and decrease in costs or inventory, for example. Prioritize the opportunities that seem the most realistic, relevant, and financially rewarding.

2. Pain Points Addressed

Describe and list every pain point that each solution will address. Evaluate the respective pain points from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective.

3. Technological Feasibility

Assess the economic competitiveness of all of your proposed tech solutions by evaluating their implementation costs for improving a process, as compared to the costs incurred by the current technology.

4. Ease of Implementation

Some ideas may have potential to make a significant improvement to your business, however there may be associated roadblocks and hindrances, such as significant capital investment, or approval requirements from a board or external parties. In cases like this, the improvement cycle may be delayed, or the spirit of the implementers broken as the improvement activity becomes too difficult to implement. Likewise, if there are improvement opportunities which are easy to implement but don’t really make a difference, then team members may see the process as not providing much benefit, and once again could lose interest in the process.

5. Time to Impact

Some solutions have significant impact on your business as soon as the “flip is switched” – such as mobile productivity apps and cloud-based repositories. Other solutions may require a significant ramp-up time before their impact on your business is tangible. For example, certain Machine Learning algorithms require a considerable dataset in place before they become effective. It’s important to take this into consideration when evaluating your solution.
Reflection

If you take the time to thoroughly evaluate all of your organization’s ideas and technology solutions across the same spectrum of criteria, you will find that prioritizing what needs to be done becomes much less of a headache. You will also reap other benefits as well, such as having the ammunition at hand to wrangle consensus from your organization’s key stakeholders on what the next best digital step will be. Good luck!

By Michael Davison

6 Protips on Getting the Most out of Your Big Data

Here’s some interesting news: a recent Teradata study showed a huge correlation between a company’s tendency to rely on data when making decisions, and its profitability and ability to innovate. According to the study, data-driven companies are more likely to generate higher profits than competitors who report a low reliance on data. Access to data and quantitative tools that convert numbers to insights are two to three times more common in data-centric companies – as well as being much more likely to reap the benefits of data initiatives, from increased information sharing, to greater collaboration, to better quality and speed of execution.

Today Big Data is a big boon for the IT industry; organizations that gather significant data are finding new ways to monetize it, while the companies that deliver the most creative and meaningful ways to display the results of Big Data analytics are lauded, coveted, and sought after. But for certain, Big Data is NOT some magic panacea that, when liberally applied to a business, creates giant fruiting trees of money.

First let’s take a look at some figures that illustrate how BIG “Big Data” is.

– A few hundred digital cameras together have enough combined memory to store the contents of every printed book in the Library of Congress.

– Just 10 minutes of world email content is, again, the contents of every printed book in the Library of Congress. Thats equal to 144x the contents of the Library of Congress every day.

– Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

– Only 3% of potentially useful data is tagged, and even less is analyzed.

– In 2010 there was 1 trillion gigabytes of data on the Internet; that number being predicted to double each year, reaching 40 trillion gigabytes by the year 2020.

The sheer size of large datasets force us to come up with new methods for analysis, and as more and more data is collected, more and more challenges and opportunites will arise.

With that in mind, lets examine, 6 things to keep in mind when considering Big Data.

1. Data analytics gives you AN answer, not THE answer.

In general, data analysis cannot make perfect predictions; instead, it might make predictions better than someone usually could without it. Also, unlike math, data analytics does not get rid of all the messiness of the dataset. There is always more than one answer. You can glean insights from any system that processes data and outputs an answer, but it’s not the only answer.

2. Data analytics involves YOUR intuition as a data analyst.

If your method is unsound, then the answer will be wrong. In fact, the full potential of quantitative analytics can be unlocked only when combined with sound business intuition. Mike Flowers, chief analytics officer for New York City under Mayor Bloomberg, explained the fallacy behind either-or thinking as such: “Intuition versus analytics is not a binary choice. I think expert intuition is the major missing component of all the chatter out there about analytics and being data driven.”

3. There is no single best tool or method to analyze data.

There are two general kinds of data, however not all analytics will necessarily include both, and as you might expect, they need to be analyzed differently.

Quantitative data refer to the information that is collected as, or can be translated into, numbers, which can then be displayed and analyzed mathematically. It can be processed using statistical methods such as calculating the mean or average number of times an event or behavior occurs over a unit of time.

Because numbers are “hard data” and not subject to interpretation, these methods can give nearly definitive answers to different questions. Various kinds of quantitative analysis can indicate changes in a dependent variable related to frequency, duration,intensity, timeline, or level, for example. They allow you to compare those changes to one another, to changes in another variable, or to changes in another population. They might be able to tell you, at a particular degree of reliability, whether those changes are likely to have been caused by your intervention or program, or by another factor, known or unknown. And they can identify relationships among different variables, which may or may not mean that one causes another. http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/evaluate/evaluate-community-interventions/collect-analyze-data/main

Qualitative data are items such as descriptions, anecdotes, opinions, quotes, interpretations, etc., and are generally either not able to be reduced to numbers, or are considered more valuable or informative if left as narratives. Qualitative data can sometimes tell you things that quantitative data can’t., such as why certain methods are working or not working, whether part of what you’re doing conflicts with participants’ culture, what participants see as important, etc. It may also show you patterns – in behavior, physical or social environment, or other factors – that the numbers in your quantitative data don’t, and occasionally even identify variables that researchers weren’t aware of. There are several different methods that can be used when analyzing qualitative data:

Content Analysis: In general, start with some ideas about hypotheses or themes that might emerge, and look for them in the data that you have collected.

Grounded Analysis: Similar to content analysis in that it uses similar techniques for coding, however you do not start from a defined point. Instead, you allow the data to ‘speak for itself’, with themes emerging from the discussions and conversations.

Social Network Analysis: Examines the links between individuals as a way of understanding what motivates behavior.

Discourse Analysis: Which not only analyses conversation, but also takes into account the social context in which the conversation occurs, including previous conversations, power relationships and the concept of individual identity.

Narrative Analysis: Looks at the way in which stories are told within an organization, in order to better understand the ways in which people think and are organized within groups.

Conversation Analysis: Is largely used in ethnographic research, and assumes that conversations are all governed by rules and patterns which remain the same, whoever is talking. It also assumes that what is said can only be understood by looking at what happened both before and after.

Sometimes you may wish to use one single method, and sometimes you may want to use several, whether all one type or a mixture of Quantitative or Qualitative data. Remember to have a goal or a question you want to answer – once you know what you are trying to learn, you can often come up with a creative way to use the data. It is your research, and only you can decide which methods will suit both your questions and the data itself. Quicktip: Make sure that the method that you use is consistent with the philosophical view that underpins your research, and within the limits of the resources available to you.

4. You do not always have the data you need in the way that you need it.

In a 2014 Teradata study, 42% of respondents said they find access to data cumbersome and not user-friendly. You might have the data, but format is KEY: it might be rife with errors, incomplete, or composed of different datasets that have to be merged. When working with particularly large datasets, oftentimes the greatest timesink – and the biggest challenge – is getting it into the form you need.

5. Not all data is equally available.

Sure, some data may exist free and easy on the Web, but more often than not, the sheer volume, velocity, or variety prevents an easy grab. Furthermore, unless there is an existing API or a vendor makes it easily accessible by some other means, you will ultimately need to write a script or even complex code to get the data the way you want it.

6. While an insight or approach adds value, it may not add enough value.

In Broken Links: Why analytics investments have yet to pay off, from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and global sales and marketing firm ZS, found that although 70% of business executives rated sales and marketing analytics as “very” or “extremely important”, just 2% are ready to say they have achieved “broad, positive impact.”

In 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported that 44% of information technology professionals said they had worked on big-data initiatives that got scrapped. A major reason for so many false starts is that data is being collected merely in the hope that it turns out to be useful once analyzed. This type of behavior is putting the cart before the horse, and can be disastrous to businesses – again, remember to have a goal or question you want to answer.

Not every new insight is worth the time or effort to integrate it into existing systems. No insight is totally new. If every insight is new, then something is wrong.

Hopefully these tips will set you off in the right direction when you are considering to incorporate additional datasets and their associated analytics platforms into your business process. Good Luck!

By Michael Davison

The Decade of Blockchain?

“Blockchain technology” – it’s been buzzing all over the financial news recently if you haven’t noticed. The term still hasn’t quite exploded onto the public square yet like Bitcoin, the notorious first implementation of the technology, but a quick Google Trend search since the first published Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 clearly shows a recent outburst of interest in “blockchain” since the end of 2015.

So what is blockchain technology anyway?

A blockchain is type of data structure that can be purposed to create a digital ledger of transactions that can be shared among a distributed network of computers. By using cryptography, each account on the network may access and manipulate the ledger securely, without the need for any central authority or middleman.

Why is blockchain important to me and my business?

As businesses continue to evolve into true digital, industries are awash in a deluge of big data; and two common challenges across SMBs continue to mount:

1. As big data’s volume increases, the ability to process and manipulate that data quickly and efficiently becomes compromised.

2. The sheer size and breadth of data in all of its environments, lifecycles, and formats increases the challenge of keeping business data secure.

Blockchain technology addresses these challenges directly in two ways:

First, with blockchain technology, there is increased transparency, accurate tracking, and a permanent, secure leger. Once a block of data is recorded on the blockchain ledger, it’s extremely difficult to change or remove. When someone wants to add to it, participants in the network — all of which have copies of the existing blockchain — run algorithms to evaluate and verify the proposed transaction.

Second, because blockchain technology obviates the need for a central authority, middleman, or clearing house, transactions can be run and approved automatically in seconds or minutes. This reduces costs and boosts efficiency.

Blockchain will make the financial services industry’s infrastructure much less expensive. The Block Chain Protocol allows the instant transfer of value, irrespective of size. Faster, cheaper settlements could trim billions of dollars from transaction costs while improving transparency.

But blockchain technology’s application isn’t limited to the financial industry – its uses are endless:

Automotive: Consumers can use the blockchain to manage fractional ownership in autonomous cars.

Voting: Using a blockchain code, constituents can cast votes via smartphone, tablet or computer, resulting in immediately verifiable results.

Healthcare: Patients’ encrypted health information can be shared with multiple providers without the risk of privacy breaches.

Source: Financial Services Technology 2020 and Beyond: Embracing disruption (PWC)

Meanwhile we are beginning to see a number of developers building APIs on the Block Chain Protocol, across a variety of applications:

– API’s to allocate digital resources such as energy, bandwidth, storage, and computation to the connected devices and services that need them. Eg; FileCoin

– API’s for Oculus Rift: With access to the virtual world now becoming TRON-esque, developers are looking at creating API’s that can be used in the virtual space to make transactions, blurring the lines between virtual and real economies.

– Micropayment API’s tailored to the type of transaction being undertaken. i.e: Tipping a blog versus Tipping a car share driver. Very useful in a shared economy where consumers increasingly become prosumers.

Source: WIRED

Blockchain: The time is now for progressive businesses.

As I mentioned earlier, Blockchain is still on the cusp of public consciousness. In a recent survey by PWC, 56% of survey respondents recognise the importance of blockchain technology, but 57% say they are unsure about or unlikely to respond to this trend. I wrote in an earlier blog post that progressive SMBs are making huge gains, and the race is already on. According to PwC’s 19th Annual Global CEO Survey, 81% of banking CEOs are concerned about the speed of technological change, more than any other industry sector.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that in the last year, more than 40 financial institutions said they were working with blockchain. Other sources detail that in 2015, 13 blockchain companies obtained over $365 million in funding, and by the beginning of this year, blockchain companies had raised well over a billion dollars to fund their development and operations.

SMBs should realize that blockchain technology is not just for the globals and multinationals. It is applicable to any sized business and can be scaled accordingly. The technology has reached a stage that some businesses are even experimenting with establishing smaller, “private blockchains” within their own offices, or are exploring how they can deploy their own blockchain on smaller “permissioned” networks.

The time is now for research and analysis – even professional consultation on the full extent of its application in your business. Certainly it’s a complex technology, with several yet-to-be determined regulatory implications, and as always, there are the usual difficulties with implementation, and sorting through the swath of competing vendors and platforms. But with a clear strategy of where, why, and how to apply the technology, you will be on the right road to incorporating blockchain into the framework of your business.

By Michael Davison

How can Your Business Optimize B2B Sales?

The Challenge

Business to Business (B2B) sales can be an incredibly nebulous, complicated, and uncertain arena to navigate and manage. The products may be varied and complex, the sales cycles are wide-ranging, and many decision-affecting influencers, contingencies, and persons/agencies may be involved.

Compete in B2B at the global level, and your challenges compound exponentially. Consider the situation of Lifetime Brands, a leading global provider of kitchenware products that include household brands such as Farberware®, KitchenAid®, Mikasa®, Pfaltzgraff®, Built®, and Fred and Friends®.

Cliff Siegel, EVP of Global Supply, at a Lifetime Brands warehouse in NJ.

Encompassing a vast, global network of factories, production schedules, warehouses, distribution points, demand planning systems, budgeting processes, and scheduling, you can imagine that Lifetime Brands’ B2B sales ecosystem is both complex and ever-changing. The sheer size and breadth of the product line makes the sales ecosystem especially vulnerable to issues and challenges that include prohibitive lead times, continually changing or unclear data, redundant manual tasks and interactions, difficult to manage budgeting processes, and difficulty in clearly aligning budget to strategic plan, among others.

Taking Action

Exactly how can a company sidestep or conquer these perils? Lifetime Brands reached out to True Interaction to help mitigate the inherent discord typified by complex sales operations. Cliff Siegel, the visionary EVP of Global Supply Chain at Lifetime Brands, had championed a set of core goals for his organization that should be familiar to all business leaders: Lifetime Brands wanted to grow revenues and increase profitability. They wanted to attract new customers, and keep existing customers happy. They wanted to make Sales operations as efficient and effective as possible. And they wanted to be able to identify and track opportunities and threats within their sales ecosystem.

Mr. Siegel knew that in order to attain these goals, Lifetime Brands would need to assume a proactive, progressive stance and shape their circumstances rather than react to them. They would need to true up the core engine of their business – the Platforms, Processes & People within their sales ecosphere – in order to transform a patchwork of disparate applications and methods into a harmonious, unified entity.

Liam Wright, CEO and Innovation Specialist of True Interaction, teamed up with Mr. Siegel to conduct an exhaustive bottom-up inventory of the existing system and all external data points and data sources, such as Demand Solutions and SAP. The disparate pieces were gathered, identified, organized, defined (and refined) using True Interaction’s proprietary innovation process including several rounds of whiteboard sessions and data identification meetings. Based upon this process, Matt Tidd, TI Chief Technical Director, had a complete map of the information landscape, and was able to architect a full-stack custom solution for Lifetime Brands, complete with the appropriate features and specifications; including Milestones, User Stories, and Tasks laid across a well-articulated development path.

A Solution

The product outcome is a fully articulated and unified Sales Portal platform, encompassing both an operational planning component and a financial planning component, that can provide sales estimates based on past history as well as the numerous continuous factors, events, and data points that influence day-to-day operations and financials. As a result, the entire value-added planning process accepts revisions quickly and easily. The Sales Portal system is able to link planning and planning procedures to the strategic plan, minimizes the time spent gathering data, maximizes the time for strategic decision making, automates collections and consolidation of budgets, enables collaboration, tracks sentiment, provides various level managers with fiscal control, and establishes a data warehouse for insightful financial planning and reporting, all within a beautiful user-experience. But most importantly, True Interaction built a custom product for Lifetime Brands that is not only cost-effective to implement, but also saves Lifetime Brands hundreds of thousands of man-hours in future enterprise operations.

“Sales portal allows us to simplify and focus the sales process, and ensure the lines of communications between sales and marketing teams are in perfect harmony. Additional benefit is gained from the resulting structured data that we can use to make informed decisions on what our customers are looking for and to better equip our sales team,” says Cliff Siegel. By investing in technology and implementing the proper digital solution, Lifetime Brands has amplified both financial and human value for its organization.

Now that Lifetime Brands has harnessed all of these disparate data sources into a unified system, they are also reaping serendipitous, unplanned-for benefits as well. For example, based upon the collaborative sales projections that the system now provides Lifetime Brands, the organization is now able to more accurately plan the related inventory requirements throughout the calendar year.

Reflection

Is the B2B sales process in your business well-organized? How well does your organization wield technology to achieve their better achieve their goals? According to SMB Group’s 2015 SMB Routes to Market Study, 29% of small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) view technology as helping them to significantly improve business outcomes. These “progressive” SMBs are 18% more likely to successfully forecast revenue increases than their peers. Progressive SMBs spend 29% more on technology, are 55% more likely to have fully integrated primary business applications (financials, CRM, HR, etc.) and are 86% more likely to use analytics than their counterparts.

 

By using technology to streamline workflows, slash time spent on repetitive data entry and inefficient processes, gain better insights into opportunities and threats, and create new business models, progressive SMBs are well positioned to tap into new customer requirements, improve customer engagement and experience, and enter new markets. As they move forward, they will continue to outpace their peers and reshape the SMB market. ~Laurie McCabe, Partner at SMB Group, Inc.

 

Are you able to make informed, actionable business decisions? Is your organization evolving with our digital ecosphere as it expands and develops? It’s time to invest in the future.

By Michael Davison

Do Your Company’s Processes Contribute to Creating Value?

As I wrote in my post last week, data shows that for SMBs, the race is still on to develop and realize a true digital business ecosphere. Ultimately, the core of any business is composed of a system of Platforms, Processes, and People. When this system is not flexible enough to accommodate new business demands – or there is a bottleneck in the flow of inputting, receiving, or processing and taking action on data – the frameworks in place force users and customers to modify their behaviors and act according to contrived rules that are based upon weaknesses and gaps in process, rather than in harmony with the environment at large.

The roadmap to creating and improving value in your organization starts with discovering and understanding these weaknesses and gaps. If you bring cracks and imperfections to light, never fear! Business process influencer Keith Swenson succinctly put it this way in his podcast, “It is ironic, that to make a robust reliable system, you do so not by hiding problems, but by exposing all the problems as they happen.”

So how do your business processes stack up?

Reviewing your processes

Let’s get started. Robert Glushko and Tim McGrath have assembled some high-level questions that can drive the initial conversation, such as:

– What is the name of the process?
– What are the goals or purposes of the process?
– What industries, functional areas, or organizations are involved in the process?
– Who are the stakeholders or participants in the process?
– Are there any problems with the current process?
– How could the process be improved?

“Increased awareness of your processess dimensionality, invariably leads to an intuitive understanding of its Strengths, Weaknessess, Opportunities & Threats.”

Go both ways

These of course, are just the inaugural questions of a true process audit. Your quintessential goal is to identify and determine what the business does, in a hierarchy of detail from the topmost level, all the way down to where individual documents (and specific information components in document exchanges) are visible. To truly understand these processes, we need to examine this from both the top-down and bottom-up points of view. This ensures understanding and confluence of strategic focus, as well as the requirements for granular tasks and contingencies.

With a little Google-fu, you can find a wealth of resources for your process review. I like this handy comprehensive list of questions to improve processes published by the University of Michigan.

Also, check out Janne Ohtonen’s 12 Important Questions When Starting BPM Projects.

Where should I start?

I’m going to assume that you are not Google, and your company does not have unlimited resources. Examine all areas and departments of your business so you can determine the most efficacious route to the biggest dividend in improvement. What small changes can you make that will have the most effect? What would your ideal solution look like? Is it aligned with your business goals? How much time and capital will your business need to invest? It’s not enough to just identify processes for improvement; you need a feasible and reasonable plan to achieve that improvement. I’ll expand on this and include tips and methodologies on this subject in future posts.

The time is now

My post on last Friday underscored the fact that technology is becoming increasingly essential to modern business, and that those SMBs that make the technology leap will reap tremendous gains over their less progressive peers. With that in mind, ALL SMBs should take the time to reassess the value of their business processes and technology solutions on a regular basis. As TI CEO O. Liam Wright says, “Increased awareness of your processes’ dimensionality invariably leads to an intuitive understanding of its Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats.”

By Michael Davison

Is Your IT Department Ready for the Digital Age?

If you are smiling to yourself about the title of this post, and the quaint term “Digital Age,” and how it’s 2016 already, and the “Digital Age” has been upon us for years now, you may want to stack your SMB up against a few eye-opening metrics regarding the state of technology in small-to-medium businesses today.

Big data is upon us, and available to every enterprise, including small businesses – but it’s what you do with it that counts. The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts a 44-fold increase in data volumes between 2009 and 2020. Despite this cambrian explosion of data, SMBs still appear to be behind when it comes to their IT capability. IDC projects a 40% growth in global data per year vs. just 5% growth in global IT spending in the future; furthermore, the organization noted that a shocking 68% of companies do not have a stated Business Intelligence / Analytics Strategy, and 79% of SMBs still use manual integration such as manual Excel files, or custom code.

Companies are no longer suffering from a lack of data—they’re suffering from a lack of the right data. Business leaders need the right big data to effectively define the strategic direction of the enterprise. The current generation of software was designed for functionality, but the next generation must also be designed for analytics. ~ Accenture Business Technology Trends Report

Right now amongst progressive SMBs, the race is on to develop and realize a true digital business ecosphere. Progressive SMBs are 55% more likely to have fully integrated business applications. Where does your organization stand in this contest? IDC predicts that by 2017, the transfer of cloud, social and big data investments from IT to line-of-business budgets will require 60% of CIOs to focus the IT budget on business innovation and value. This metric jibes with the results from Accenture’s Technology Vision survey, polling more than 2,000 business and technology executives across nine countries and 10 industries. According to the survey, 62% of SMBs are currently investing in digital technologies, and 35 percent are comprehensively investing in digital as part of their overall business strategy. In a recent article, Laurie McCabe, Partner at tech industry research masterminds SMB Group, points out that that these progressive SMBs are well positioned to tap into new customer requirements, improve customer engagement and experience, and enter new markets. “As progressive SMBs move forward,” she notes, “they will continue to outpace their peers and reshape the SMB market.”

How will the market be reshaped? Accenture notes that 81 percent of companies believe that “in the future, industry boundaries will dramatically blur as platforms reshape industries into interconnected ecosystems”. Progressive SMBs that continue to invest in IT capability will reap tremendous gains; those that bring up the rear will be behind by orders of magnitude. Furthermore, being progressive leads directly to revenue: For instance, according to SMB Group, 75% of the Progressive medium businesses (who increased technology spending) anticipated revenue gains in 2012, compared to just 17% of medium businesses that decreased IT spending.

Naturally, some SMBs don’t have the budget or staff to “flip the switch” and implement a bottom-up overhaul of their entire business process to create a fully integrated digital solution. But that is OK. By working with a capable digital business enterprise development vendor, SMBs can commence an incremental, but still integrated approach to business management solutions. Companies can begin, for example, with a financials module, and then continue to add integrated modules as required and when able, to manage other functions such as manufacturing, distribution, project accounting, or sales and marketing, at their own pace. The important part is to get moving, and to take the time to honestly assess how your organization is using technology today.

True Interaction produces custom full-stack end-to-end custom secure and compliant technology solutions across web, desktop and mobile – integrating data sources from e-commerce, enterprise resource planning, customer service, document inventory management, spend, performance… whatever data your business requires. From legacy systems to open source, we can determine the most optimal means to achieve operational perfection, devising and implementing the right tech stack to fit your business. We routinely pull together disparate data sources, fuse together disconnected silos, and do exactly what it takes for organizations to operate with tight tolerances, making your business engine hum.

Are you ready for the Digital Age? For real, this time? Let’s go!

By Michael Davison