Consider Node.JS Development for Your Software Solution!
If you are not a technology nerd, or an IT pro, you may not know what Node (or Node.JS) is and why it should matter to your organization. Node.JS is a renowned runtime environment built on the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine, to streamline the development of high-performance, scalable software applications. It is based on an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that ensures the lightweight and efficient creation of a wide range of software applications.
Gartner predicts that ‘organizations that offer users access to a curated catalog of internal and external data will derive twice as much business value from analytics investments as those that do not.’ In order to make the most of the data that resides in all the corners of your enterprise, you must make sense of that data, and leverage it to create products and services, to compete in your market of choice and refine your workflow and tasks to improve productivity and agility.
The key to making the most of your data is analytics, and the ability to gather and analyze data and produce results that are intuitive and clear. Machine learning has evolved to support the average business user with tools and techniques that make it easier to gather and analyze data using simple techniques that are supported by analytical techniques, without requiring business users to have data science skills.
‘Auto Insights analytics allows business users to select the dataset to be analyzed, and let the system do the rest.’
Today’s business users expect to have access to software solutions and techniques that are easy to understand and navigate. As consumers, they have the world at their fingertips, with simple techniques that require little to no technical knowledge. If your enterprise plans to adopt augmented analytics tools and business intelligence techniques, it must provide simple tools that are easy enough for the average business users to incorporate into workflow and tasks. This approach will help the organization achieve its analytical goals while ensuring an appropriate return on investment (ROI) and decreasing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). It can also encourage and enable Citizen Data Scientist initiatives and improve data literacy.
The Auto Insights approach to analytics provides a foundation of Assisted Predictive Modeling and easy-to-use tools, making it simple enough for every business user to adopt as an important tool in the team toolkit, and supporting the path from business user to Citizen Data Scientist, with tools that encourage data literacy.
Auto Insights frees business users and reduces the time and skills required to produce accurate, clear results, quickly and dependably, using machine learning that frees the business user to collect and analyze data with the guided assistance of a ‘smart’ solution.
Auto Insights allows business users to select the dataset to be analyzed, and let the system do the rest. The tool will interpret the dataset, select important columns of data, analyze its type and variety and other parameters and then use intelligent machine learning to automatically apply the best algorithm and analytical technique and provide data insight so the user can easily see and understand the results.
The Auto Insights concept is applied to data repositories to enable the enterprise and its business users to perform complex data analytics and share analysis across the organization in a self-serve, mobile environment, bringing the power of sophisticated, advanced analytics and smart data visualization to the members to automate and analyze, so enterprise users can quickly get the answers they need and move on to make confident decisions.
‘The key to making the most of your data is analytics, and the ability to gather, analyze and view data easily, and produce results that are intuitive and clear.’
If you are interested in finding out more about the advantages of the Smarten Auto Insights approach to Augmented Analytics and self-serve search analytics, Contact Us to explore how these techniques can help your enterprise apply analytics to achieve results. Let us help you realize your business goals and objectives with fact-based information.
Whether you are an IT pro, a business owner or business manager, you probably like to stay up to date on industry developments, and on the newest technology. That is a wise choice, because these advancements can often provide leverage for you to enhance products and/or services, and create competitive advantage.
Mobile BI Business Use Illustrates Real Advantages!
Mobile Business Intelligence (or Mobile BI) is defined as ‘a system comprising both technical and organizational elements that present historical and/or real-time information to its users for analysis on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (not laptops), to enable effective decision-making and management support, for the overall purpose of increasing firm performance.’
Aberdeen Group reports that businesses adopt Mobile BI to:
Improve business process efficiency
Improve employee productivity
Make better decisions, more quickly
Provide better customer service
Deliver real-time bi-directional data access to make decisions anytime and anywhere.
‘Mobile BI benefits go well beyond simple reporting and the sharing of data across user groups, to address real business issues and to keep users up to date and allow them to respond to real world, real-time issues.’
As local and global competition increases, most businesses are looking for ways to improve their competitive advantage, and to quickly adapt to the changing market, to employee needs and to customer buying behavior.
It can be helpful to consider some real-world business use cases, in order to understand the value and benefit of incorporating a Mobile BI solution within your technology landscape and your analytics approach.
The advantages of Mobile BI go beyond team collaboration and individual reporting needs, to provide the background and foundational information needed to make decisions on business strategy and to understand customer preferences.
The following list of companies represents a small sampling of businesses currently using Mobile BI to improve business results and efficiency:
Amazon – Amazon analyzes purchasing behavior and browsing history to predict what products a customer might want to see, and what they are likely to buy, personalizing the customer experience and making it easier for customers to complete a transaction. BI tools help the business to forecast demand and ensure that stock is available.
Starbucks – The business has implemented a loyalty program to help with customer engagement and sales, personalizing marketing strategies and allowing customers to order, pay and receive rewards. It gathers data using its digital channels and uses that data to create targeted offers and to improve customer retention, as well as increasing the amount customers spend during a visit.
Netflix – The company uses BI tools to personalize the viewing experience and to analyze customer viewing preferences and push specific options to the customer based on viewing history. Mobile BI tools allow teams to analyze and share information regarding regional viewing and to make decisions on the fly.
Uber – The company business model is dependent on the rapid changes and shifting behavior of customers from one local and regional area to the next. Real-time pricing and operational decisions are made to support surge pricing and driver deployment for high demand areas. The back-end systems and BI tools allow drivers to access information using the Uber app so that they can quickly respond to the changing environment.
Tesla – Mobile BI and wireless car data analytics allow Tesla to connect remotely to corporate offices and collect and analyze vehicle data to address issues and update customers on maintenance etc.
X/Twitter – Mobile BI provides support or moderators to identify and quickly address platform safety issues, violations, etc. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with BI tools allows the business to quickly respond and ensure a safe user experience.
Mobile BI provides the background and foundational information needed to make decisions on business strategy and to understand customer preferences.
These examples illustrate the many ways in which Mobile BI can be used to address business issues, providing user access and analytics for team members no matter where they are and how they need to use the data. Mobile BI benefits go well beyond simple reporting and the sharing of data across user groups, to address real business issues and to keep users up to date and allow them to respond to real world, real-time issues.
If you want to support your business user team and provide a foundation for BI tools that will better serve your team and your customers, explore Smarten Mobile BI benefits and features, with powerful functionality and access for your business users including out-of-the-box Mobile BI and advanced analytics for every team member. For more information on Mobile BI and Augmented Analytics, read our article, ‘Understanding The Truth About Mobile BI.’
Analytics Solutions Should Include Key Influencer Analytics!
What is Key Influencer Analytics ? Simply put, Key Influencer Analytics is an analytical technique that helps the user analyze and understand the various factors affecting an outcome, what variables impact the metric, and the ranking of those factors. Key Influencer Analytics takes the guesswork out of decisions by clearly illustrating what factors influence success of a pricing strategy, a business location choice, a marketing campaign, a research project, etc.
‘With the right analytics solution, your users can simply point to the dataset they want to analyze and Key Influencer Analytics will identify the target and the influencers or predictors that will affect the target, along with its impact.’
Grand View Research estimates the analytics software market at nearly 142B USD, with an expected growth of nearly 14% over the next five to six years. The reason for this growth is simple. In order to succeed in their market of choice, businesses must understand the competition, the customer and how their products and services are perceived and embraced in the market, so they can plan for the future and adapt to changes.
There are a few factors that will impact the efficiency and effectiveness of the analytics solution you choose.
First, the data volume you want to analyze can be very large, and the data can come from disparate systems, so the ability to integrate and gather all data in one place is important. Depending on the size of the dataset a user selects, there may be hundreds or thousands of variables, and business users often find it difficult to identify the rights ones. Yet without the ability to identify the right variables, the business is likely to measure and attend to the wrong things.
Secondly, you must provide easy-to-use tools that your team can leverage to find what they need. Users should have interactive features that allow them to see and explore other combinations and impacts and can select target and predictors, and use them for models, reports or KPIs. Influencer Analytics empowers every business user and allows them quickly select and target data to achieve results without the assistance of a data scientist, IT professional or analyst.
Third, your team needs key influencer analytics to understand the interrelationships of data points and how they affect outcomes so they can adapt and adjust. With the right analytics solution, your users can simply point to the dataset they want to analyze and Key Influencer Analytics will identify the target and the influencers or predictors that will affect the target, along with its impact and it provides crucial metrics such as mean, outliers, and others and identifies relationship and distribution among variables. The system will auto-suggest relationships and present distribution and impact using the most appropriate visualization.
Here are just a few of the benefits of Key Influencer Analytics:
Identify what matters most in your data!
Understand the impact and interdependence of variables
Leverage auto-suggestions and machine learning to get data insights
Identify influencers affecting the target variable with auto-suggestions and quick maneuvers using different combinations
‘Key Influencer Analytics takes the guesswork out of decisions by clearly illustrating what factors influence success of a pricing strategy, a business location choice, a marketing campaign, a research project, etc.’
With Key Influencer Analytics your team can address the right issues and capitalize on opportunities to optimize results. Explore Smarten Augmented Analytics modules and components and the benefits of Key Influencer Analytics for your team and your enterprise.
Software Product Development Projects Require Specific Skills!
You have a really great business idea for a software product and you want to develop the concept. Perhaps it is a business application you want to sell to other businesses, or it might be a consumer software product or web application. Whatever the case, your business will want to proceed carefully. There are many developers, programmers and IT consulting partners who offer custom software application development services, and mobile application development, but there is a distinct difference between custom software application development and software product development and therein lie the issue.
Give Your Team Traditional and Modern BI in One Solution
Business Intelligence (BI) solutions have been around for some time. The traditional BI tools were designed to be used by the IT team, business analysts and data scientists and utilized sophisticated features which required specialized knowledge and skills possessed only by the technical and analytical community. In this environment, business users were consumers of content, and while they could access information from dashboards, reports and KPIs, they had very limited access to date and they could not interact with that data. Where users had access to data, BI objects, reports and dashboards were developed, provisioned and presented to them by the IT team, so the business user had no control over what they could see or the format of the data.
‘In the past, business users were restricted to analytical content provided by IT staff and Data Scientists with limited interaction and access to data’
Gartner predicted that ‘…smart/augmented, nonrelational-, search- and visual-based data discovery capabilities will converge into a single set of next generation data discovery capabilities as components of modern BI and analytics platforms.’
In line with Gartner predictions, the new world of Augmented Analytics and Modern BI solutions enables end-users and team members to access and use business intelligence (BI) to combine their industry and functional knowledge with clear, concise data. These new solutions are focused on business users, and on their empowerment, placing the power of true insight into the hands of business users and transitioning business users into Citizen Data Scientists. These solutions provide more value to the organization, improving technology Return on Investment (ROI), Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increasing efficiency with fact-based decisions. Modern BI and Augmented Analytics offers data integration and sophisticated analytical models and techniques in an easy-to-use interface that provides auto-suggestions and recommendations to speed the analytical process and ensure that users get what they need. It also provides report formats, publishing tools, alerts and analysis that can be shared by team members to encourage user adoption and collaboration.
As the needs of the average user evolve, most businesses find that a combination of traditional BI tools and Modern BI tools will best meet the needs of the team and ensure that every team member has the tools they need to get the job done.
Here are the primary features and functionality your business will need to capture Traditional Business Intelligence components and provide comprehensive coverage for your team. These solutions allow the IT staff to provide dashboards and reports for business user consumption and review:
Personalized Dashboards – Users with average technical skills can design personalized dashboards in minutes without programming knowledge.
Multidimensional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – The team can define KPIs using an intuitive expression engine and KPI software to set polarity, frequency and threshold levels.
Social Business Intelligence – Imagine an environment where business users can access a business intelligence and analysis portal and see popular data to rate, share and comment.
What-If Analysis – Enables business users to determine how a prospective change to a product, service, resource allocation, budget, schedule, pricing, raw material cost, labor cost, or other factors might affect the business bottom line.
Graphical Analysis – Business users can leverage stunning visualizations, alerts for exceptions and trends, and intuitive, mobile BI dashboards with true deep dive capabilities!
Mobile Business Intelligence – Business intelligence solutions your business users can enjoy with high-performance BI tools that will work on any size or type of device.
GeoMap Support – Users can leverage geo maps, analyze data for any location, and define geographic areas with support for drill down, spot lighter and other features.
Exceptions and Personalized Alerts – With exception reporting users can define thresholds, monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and metrics, and even receive alerts when exceptions occur with the ability to set, modify and delete alerts based on specific thresholds.
R Integration – Integrates seamlessly with R (the popular open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing), so users can integrate any R script with simple input and output configuration.
Print Reports – The IT team can leverage a simple, basic programming or scripting environment to define format templates and produce reports for delivery by email.
Web-Based BI Reports – Business intelligence reporting software enables users to point-and-click and drag-and-drop to create a report summarizing performance metrics, or operational data, without programming or database or SQL skills.
Modern BI and Advanced Analytics – Augmented Analytics enables the transition from business user to Citizen Data Scientist and supports data democratization and data literacy, allowing Data Scientists to focus on strategy and business user access to analytics to perform day-to-day analytics.
Assisted Predictive Modeling – Predictive analytics for business users provides predictive modeling capability assisted by auto-recommendations and auto-suggestions to simplify use and optimize outcomes, allowing business users to predict outcomes without the expertise of a data scientist.
Auto Insights – The Auto Insights Smarten toolset allows business users to simply select the dataset to be analyzed and let the system interpret the dataset, select important columns of data, analyze its type and variety and other parameters and use intelligent machine learning to automatically apply the best algorithm and analytical technique and provide data insights.
Key Influencer Analytics – Focus on what matters and find the most relevant influencers for your target KPIs. Business users often find it difficult to identify the right targets and to understand relationships and factors that influence results.
Anomaly Analysis – Reveal trends, anomalies and answers, map targets, focus on influencers that matter and adapt to succeed.
Smart Data Visualization – Smart data visualization allows business users to view and analyze data to identify a problem and clarify a root cause and to make confident decisions.
Self-Serve Data Preparation – Smart data discovery tools and augmented data preparation features allow business users with average skills to perform data preparation and transform, shape, reduce, combine, explore, clean, sample and aggregate data, without the need for SQL skills, ETL or other programming language.
‘As the needs of the average user evolve, most businesses find that a combination of traditional BI tools and Modern BI tools will best meet the needs of the team and ensure that every team member has the tools they need to get the job done.’
There are other many other features and components available to support users, IT, business analysts and data scientists in the traditional and modern analytics environment.
If you have chosen MEAN Stack development as the environment in which you wish to develop your project, you are probably wondering whether to attempt an in-house development or to choose an IT partner that is skilled and experienced in MEAN Stack.
No matter the development environment, the enterprise typically does not have enough resources to dedicate to a development project. Adding this type of project to the responsibilities and tasks already assigned to your IT team can mean that your team is pulled away from other critical tasks, and it can create risk. Existing tasks may be delayed, and IT professionals may feel overwhelmed and you may lose team members.
Of course, there is another critical issue here, namely whether your team has MEAN Stack skills. In order to quickly and effectively create your software product or application, your business must ensure that the team assigned to the project has the experience and knowledge needed to assure success.
‘When reviewing the references, capabilities and services of MEAN stack developers and IT partners, the enterprise must ensure that the prospective partner and its team is capable of overseeing the full development lifecycle.’
By engaging a skilled IT partner, you can ensure that the project is completed without a lot of rework, and that all resources and capabilities are available to you to help you achieve success. The cost and time required to complete a project using professional MEAN Stack developers is much more likely to meet enterprise requirements and produce outcomes that satisfy end users, customers, suppliers, partners and stakeholders.
It is estimated that nearly 70% of professional developers are currently using MEAN Stack for projects. To be sure you choose the right partner, you must include the following skills in your vendor review:
Soft and Interactive Skills to Accommodate Client and Executive Meetings
Working with Client IT Team and Users as Appropriate to Achieve Goals
Gathering Project Requirements
Comprehensive Knowledge of MEAN Components
Building Application Integration Platforms (APIs)
Establishing Optimal Database Structures and Data Models, and Server-Side Logic
Angular JS Front-End Components, e.g. UI router, filters, forms, etc.
Connecting Front-End UI to Back-End Data Repository
Writing Modules
Establishing and Re-Using Libraries
Comprehensive Testing Across All Relevant Devices and Browsers
Creating and Executing a Deployment Plan
Providing Detailed Code Documentation
Ensuring Ongoing User and Code Maintenance and Support
Creating Roadmaps for Upgrades
Performing Bug Fixes and Upgrades
Application Design and Development
Software Reengineering
Custom Application Development
User Experience Design
Application Maintenance And Support
Software Product Upgrades and Migration
Application Upgrades and Migration
Application Integration
Application Interface Usability and User Experience (Ux) Improvement
Expert Software Application Developers
24/7 SLA Driven Application User Support and Technical Support
ISO 9001-2015 quality certification
Robust partnership program
Providing Appropriate Skills, Experience and Availability At Every Stage of the Project
‘The cost and time required to complete a project using professional MEAN Stack developers is much more likely to meet enterprise requirements and produce outcomes that satisfy end users, customers, suppliers, partners and stakeholders.’
When reviewing the references, capabilities and services of MEAN stack developers and IT partners, the enterprise must ensure that the prospective partner and its team is capable of overseeing the full development lifecycle.
Avoid Complex Analytics Solutions (Your Users Will Hate)
When a business is considering a business intelligence or analytics solution, it is important to recognize that today’s solutions are very different than the solutions of the past. Not only do they include more analytical techniques and features, but they have come a long way in providing access to sophisticated analytics for the average enterprise team member.
Harvard Business Review Analytics Service reports that
a) businesses can substantially improve business performance by giving frontline workers modern self-service analytics tools to enable fast intelligent action and,
b) not all self-service analytics provide this effective approach.
The Harvard Business Review Analytics Service surveyed nearly 500 executives and found that they reported significant performance improvement when they empowered frontline workers with augmented analytics. More than one-third of those surveyed noted improvement in customer and employee engagement and in product and service quality.
While some businesses may still be using business intelligence and analytics that are designed for data scientists and IT professionals, most of those are actively working to upgrade and/or migrate to augmented analytics and solutions that are designed for self-serve business user access.
Here’s why:
Search-based, self-serve analytics provides swift access to data and familiar natural language processing (NLP) search capability so business users can ask a question, get an answer and drill down to discover the root cause of issues. There is no need for the user to wait for IT or a data scientist to produce a report. They can continue to work on a task or a problem with full insight into results, challenges and possibilities.
The enterprise can enable data democratization and data literacy across the business landscape, thereby ensuring that there is a rapid response to market and competitive changes and to changing customer buying behavior.
Business users can leverage their industry knowledge and functional skillset and combine data insight with experience to produce the best results.
Intuitive, easy-to-use solutions help to combat user resistance and ensure user adoption. While there are always cultural issues surrounding this type of adoption and the perceived changes in responsibilities, when business users see the value of having crucial information at their fingertips, the enterprise can ease the transition and ensure user adoption.
No matter the role of the user, the team can enjoy the benefits of augmented analytics and make the transition to Citizen Data Scientists to improve collaboration, data sharing and fact-based decision-making.
The business can understand quality and maintenance issues, refine customer targeting and marketing optimization, and make appropriate financial investments, and they can analyze trends and patterns and make forecasts and predictions.
When the enterprise adopts these tools and techniques, they allow Citizen Data Scientists to perform analytics on a day-to-day basis and, where appropriate to effectively interact with and collaborate with the IT team and data scientists to refine data and prepare it for more strategic initiatives, so there is a seamless handoff from the business user to the analytical community, when and as necessary.
When the business is ready to acquire augmented analytics or to upgrade from existing, more restrictive solutions designed for professional analytical resources, it is important to choose the right solution – one with sophisticated tools that are presented in an intuitive user interface with auto-suggestions and recommendations to assist business users, and ample personalization of dashboards and reports.
We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also disclose information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners.Accept Cookies
