Consider MEAN Development for Your Mobile Application Project!
Recent studies reveal that mobile apps are more popular than ever, and growing exponentially in the market. Here are just some of the study results to ponder:
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Discover the Elegant MicroWeb Difference
We invite you to explore our latest knowledgebase articles and to join the Smarten user community on Smarten Support Portal.
How Can a Dx Strategy Prepare Your Business for the Unexpected (Like a Pandemic)?
If your business is on the fence about making a move toward Digital Transformation (Dx), you might be interested in a recent study by IDG that surveyed businesses about the results of Dx and its benefits. 52% said that Dx enables worker productivity through tools such as AI-assisted processes, 49% said that that Dx gave the business the ability to better manage business performance through data availability and 46% said that Dx helped the business to better meet customer experience expectations.
Four of the Many Reasons to Use Java and Hire Java Programmers!
Recent studies provide support for the choice of Java for programming and project support. It is estimated that Java will continue to grow in popularity because of its resilience, security and simplicity. SimilarTech reports that Java is popular in numerous vertical industries including:
Don’t Be Daunted by the Challenges of BI Tools. Self-Serve BI is the Answer!
Gartner research reveals that, ‘90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency.’ As business professionals, we all know that information is power and today, your business users are expected to know more and to keep pace with industry, market and customer changes that will negatively impact the business or have provide potential opportunities. But how do your team members achieve these goals when they are busier than ever, and the changes are coming more rapidly than ever!
‘Simple, self-serve BI tools can provide your business with the foundation to achieve your goals with features and tools like Social BI, Mobile BI, Embedded BI, etc.’
In this article, we will discuss the topic of modern business intelligence tools and solutions and the advantages of providing self-serve tools to your users for day-to-day analysis and intelligence gathering.
First, let’s look at some of the challenges you will need to consider when implementing self-serve BI tools:
Challenges of Self-Serve BI
- Technology Access and Infrastructure Readiness – Your IT, finance and management teams will need a comprehensive understanding of your current technology and infrastructure, the data hubs, data warehouses and software solutions (legacy, best-of-breed, ERP, etc.) that will provide the foundational data for your users. You will need a plan and a roadmap to integrate these into your business intelligence strategy. A modern, seamless BI solution can provide a simple solution for what might otherwise be a challenging situation. If you can easily integrate your data sources and make them available for data gathering and analytics, your users can leverage the data to report, share and collaborate.
- Team Member Adoption and Understanding – Your team will also need an understanding of the average technology skills of your business users and their willingness to adopt new tools and solutions. If your team members perceive that your BI tools are difficult to use, or if they are not educated on the need for and the benefits of self-serve business intelligence, they are unlikely to adopt the new tools. If, on the other hand, they see the value to their role and how it can make them more productive and streamline their work process; if they see that the solution is easy and intuitive to use, your business is less likely to face the challenges of team reluctance.
There are many other challenges and considerations that should inform your BI tools strategy, but these two are perhaps the most important.
Now, let’s consider some of the many benefits of self-serve business intelligence and how it can support your goals and simplify the lives of your business users:
Benefits of Self-Serve BI
- Social BI – Social BI allows users to champion the use of business intelligence. Power users and those who are curious by nature will create reports, share and collaborate, using easy-to-use tools and thereby encourage others to use the tools and to repurpose report formats etc. to achieve their own goals. Social BI allows business users to share, ‘like’ and perform tasks in a way that is similar to social networking and is therefore popular among business users.
- Mobile BI – Today’s team members often work remotely, or spend a lot of time on the road. By providing self-serve business intelligence that is intuitive to use and accessible on Android and iOS devices, the business can ensure that users will have seamless access and can accomplish tasks, search for information, share and collaborate, without missing a beat!
- Data Democratization and Data Literacy – If you want your team members to grow and add more value, you want to encourage data literacy and ensure data democratization. Move away from restricted data access and sole ownership of analytics by data scientists, IT and business analysts. Provide easy-to-use tools that allow for simple search analytics in a Google-type environment and will make it easier for reluctant business users to embrace your new BI solution and develop new data analytics skills they can use for fact-based decisions.
- User Adoption – There is nothing more frustrating than spending the time and money to implement a new solution, only to find that your users are resistant to using that solution. With true self-serve BI tools and intuitive data visualization, reporting, analytics and access, users will want to adopt the tools and share their discoveries with other team members.
- Embedded BI – If you want to leverage existing technology, improve your Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for your current solutions and infrastructure, consider that self-serve BI tools can be embedded into existing solutions. With embedded BI with Integration APIs, users can leverage familiar, favorite software solutions in a single sign-on environment, and find information within those solutions without having to learn complicated new techniques or fighting with data silos and transferring data from one place to another.
There are many other advantages to Self-Serve Business Intelligence. This short list should give you some ideas of how you can leverage these tools in your own business landscape.
‘As business professionals, we all know that information is power and today, your business users are expected to know more and to keep pace with industry, market and customer changes that will negatively impact the business or have provide potential opportunities.’
Business Intelligence solutions should include tools and techniques that make it easier to achieve data literacy and provide data analytics access to all business users. Simple, self-serve BI tools can provide your business with the foundation to achieve your goals with features and tools like Social BI, Mobile BI, Embedded BI, etc. Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.
Original Post : Let’s Discuss: Benefits and Challenges of Self-Serve BI!
What is MEAN, and Why Should I Hire MEAN Programmers to Get the Most Out of the Components?
In its review of the MEAN stack development suite, TechTarget.com states that, ‘(The MEAN) stack of development tools helps to eliminate the language barriers often experienced in software development.’ There is, perhaps, no better way to explain why the MEAN stack of tools and services has gained such popularity. Developers know their job and their tools but, when these tools are combined to provide more ease-of-use and to help developers navigate and leverage the various features, the development process is much simpler and quicker.
Trying to Decide if Digital Transformation is Important? Here’s Some Facts and Figures!
If your business is considering a Digital Transformation (Dx) initiative, these statistics may be of interest you:
Ensure Business Users Will Adopt BI Tools with Self-Serve BI and Cross-Tab Analytics!
Gartner has predicted that, ‘90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency.’ Establishing the strategy is one thing, but getting business users to adopt an analytics and information-based business workflow is quite another.
‘Modern business intelligence tools that are designed with self-serve features makes it easy enough for every user (no matter their technical skill) to leverage analytics to report, share and collaborate.’
When it comes to teams, there are two things that are always true: 1) they learn a process and workflow and rarely want to change that familiar process and 2) they are always suspicious of ‘new’ initiatives and nearly always believe that these new initiatives will result in more work for them. There is a reason your team resists new processes and initiatives and that reason is simple. Usually, their fears are warranted!
So, if you want to engender support for new analytics initiatives and engage a business community in fact-based, action-oriented initiatives, you need to plan this new initiative with your users in mind.
In this article, we focus on two of the primary components of a new business user analytics initiative.
Self-Serve BI Tools
Modern business intelligence tools that are designed with self-serve features like smart data visualization, self-serve data preparation and assisted predictive modeling make it easy enough for every user (no matter their technical skill) to leverage analytics to report, share and collaborate. By adding value to the user’s everyday tasks and reducing the rework and issues they will confront, you can encourage your users to adopt analytics initiatives.
- Any promotion of analytics strategy must clearly illustrate business use cases and benefits of these tools.
- Support a more productive, streamlined environment that will allow them to do more with less and get the job done quickly.
- Ensure that business users can collaborate and share and grow their own expertise and visibility.
- Provide measurable results and information to make recommendations and support those recommendations.
Cross-Tab Analytics Capabilities
Those self-serve tools should include reporting and graphical tools that are clear and concise. Business users don’t want tools that produce complex reports filled with columns and mind-numbing numbers that do not help them reach a decision or illustrate an issue. Cross-tab analytics have been around for some time but the new, improved versions of this capability provides real insight into data in a way that is clear for every user. Sophisticated functionality is underpinned with easy-to-use tools so users can analyze the relationship between or among two or more variables and summarize data in rows and columns making it easy to understand the relationships and intersection of the various types of data. Understanding relationships in data is crucial to identifying the root cause of a problem or to targeting an issue or identifying a business opportunity. Your team members can work with multi-dimensional data and perform ad-hoc queries to gain a clear view of performance, dive into your data, and find and understand the data they need quickly and intuitively. Cross-tab analysis simplifies complex data operations, summary operations, time series functions, filters and custom column expressions and enables business users with simple tools they can really use.
‘If you want to engender support for new analytics initiatives and engage a business community in fact-based, action-oriented initiatives, you need to plan this new initiative with your users in mind.’
Business Intelligence tools can improve your business results. If your business understands the challenges of implementing a business intelligence solution and adequately plans for implementation and user adoption, it can leverage the benefits of these tools and solutions and ensure success. Let us help you achieve your vision and improve productivity and insight across the organization.
Original Post : Enable User Adoption with Self-Serve BI and Cross-Tab Analytics!
Cross-Platform Apps Are Exploding. Hire Experts To Ensure That YOURS Is Successful!
A recent Statista report reveals that the popularity of cross-platform applications is growing by leaps and bounds with 3.5 million apps available on Google Play, 2.2 million in the Apple App Store and nearly 500,000 in the Amazon AppStore. The popularity of cross-platform applications is not surprising. Today’s consumers and business users want access to their favorite apps from all of their devices, whether those devices be based on iOS or on Android. Developers and service providers must satisfy these expectations by offering seamless access and navigation on all types of devices.
Hire Hybrid Mobile App Programmers and Build Your Software Team with Confidence!
Statista reports approximately 3.38 million apps in the Google Play Store and 2.22 million apps in the Apple App Store, and an estimated annual revenue of $935 billion dollars for the mobile app market. Certainly impressive statistics! If your organization wants to jump into the market with a consumer app or develop a mobile app for business users, one of the first decisions you will need to make is whether to design for the Android or the Apple market, or to design for both.
