Tag: business intelligence

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Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

You Deserve To Know About Things That Will Make Your Business Better

Every business in the marketplace, from freelancer and entrepreneur to the largest of enterprises, is facing tremendous pressure to change how they do business. Workers demand more options for balancing business with personal life; consumers demand more and different modes of interaction; and business stakeholders continue to demand positive performance even as the pace of change increases.

Digital, social and mobile aren’t fringe considerations in business any more.

People use their phones all the time to do all sorts of things, and a lot of the time those “things” impact the business. From apps and processes that support how work gets done to the policies that guide various aspects of operation and interaction, businesses are discovering that embracing digital workflows and emerging operating models is the new imperative. Every interaction is a transaction, and there are many possible actors collaborating on each one. How well understood is this activity within the business?

From within and without businesses are forced to react to various influences shaping user and consumer behavior, adjusting their processes and creating new core workflows to address digital data, online, social and mobile models that were once considered to be more fringe than foundation. Few businesses, particularly those smaller companies where only one or a few participants do all the work, have a central framework in place to support the vast array of processes and tasks they perform, and even less to help adjust to changing business requirements.

Relying more on individual knowledge than documented processes and structure, small businesses are generally able to retain their agility only as long as they also retain their small size.

What is usually missing in the small business is a foundational workflow system and framework which sets the table for future improvements within the business, and establishes the flexibility to support faster execution while saving costs and reducing investment.

Most business owners don’t consider a workflow-driven system to be an imperative, focusing more on the solutions which address specific operational tasks and activities. This approach may meet business needs for a short time, but the sprawl and distribution of business data and activities enabled with the bolt-on “app” approach often fragments things rather than tying them closely together.

Doing things right in the beginning saves time, effort and money compared to fixing things later.

Businesses should create an organizational structure and employee culture that is “process aware”, developed and built on the solid foundation of structured workflows.  This gives the entire organization a visible basis for improvement at any level, allowing a focus on work attitude and operations that are positive and healthier for the company.

It has been proven time and time again that implementing a flexible framework for structuring workflow within the business will help the enterprise improve performance, undertake efforts to support better decision-making, and achieve a competitive advantage. The structure, crossing all functional boundaries and taking a holistic view of the processes, helps ensure that stakeholder perspectives are aligned, makes sure that everyone has a clear understanding of how processes are undertaken and why, and ultimately focuses all organizational efforts towards the right goal.

This is the introductory article in a series which will discuss the values of a structured workflow solution applied to small and growing businesses and why every business large or small should immediately implement such a system.

The discussion focuses on a solution which I believe presents the framework and extensibility required to address the essential needs of business process management along with the flexibility in design to address more unique and sophisticated flows and integrations.

Meet Exact Synergy Enterprise.

The series will discuss WHY businesses must consider implementing workflow and process management and how Synergy meets those needs.  Further, we’ll take a look at a successful QuickBooks consultant and developer who implements Synergy internally and for their clients. That article explores how their Synergy-founded professional time and billing solution works with QuickBooks, addressing time and resource management requirements that other solutions couldn’t provide.

The discussion then addresses how bookkeepers, consultants and other QuickBooks advisors can quickly and easily implement a structured workflow solution that delivers immediate value to the business. With out-of-the-box functionality to address essential business processes and activity management including CRM, document management, human resources management and more, there is little or no configuration required making the solution useful on the first launch.

The final article takes a look at Synergy implemented in a business, demonstrating the extensive ability for the system to be custom configured directly by the customer. It is the ability to be customized easily, meeting specific process requirements and connecting to the applications and data that round out the operations that makes Synergy particularly powerful and a key component to enabling a successful transformation into an agile, high performance business in the digital age.

syn·er·gy

the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

 cooperation interaction, cooperation, combined effort, give and take

 

Make Sense?

J

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The nasty surprises hackers have in store for us in 2018

“Hackers are constantly finding new targets and refining the tools they use to break through cyberdefenses. The following are some significant threats to look out for this year.

More huge data breaches

The cyberattack on the Equifax credit reporting agency in 2017, which led to the theft of Social Security numbers, birth dates, and other data on almost half the U.S. population, was a stark reminder that hackers are thinking big when it comes to targets. ..

Ransomware in the cloud

… The biggest cloud operators, like Google, Amazon, and IBM, have hired some of the brightest minds in digital security, so they won’t be easy to crack. But smaller companies are likely to be more vulnerable, and even a modest breach could lead to a big payday for the hackers involved.

The weaponization of AI

This year will see the emergence of an AI-driven arms race. Security firms and researchers have been using machine-learning models, neural networks, and other AI technologies for a while to better anticipate attacks, and to spot ones already under way. It’s highly likely that hackers are adopting the same technology to strike back…”

Source: The nasty surprises hackers have in store for us in 2018

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Cloud and Digital are Driving Change in Professional Practice

Accounting and Finance Professionals: Cloud and Digital are Driving Change in Professional Practice

Accountants and financial consultants working in public practice are experiencing a revolutionary change, evolving from documents and paper-based processes with after-the-fact reporting to real-time business management and providing services which support daily decision-making.  The underlying cause for this evolution in business accounting is the technology: cloud and collaborative computing models are enabling much closer and regular interaction between accounting professionals and the businesses they serve. Even more, technology is taking its proper place in automating once tedious activities, allowing professionals to focus on causes and results rather than on transactions.

What is the real impact this is having on the accounting profession?  It’s forcing a new focus and attention on change management within the practice, and is causing professionals to recognize the requirement for standardization of processes and development of controls which are the foundations for creating sustainability in a business.  The goal now is placing reliance on process rather than people, which establishes the basis for intelligent automation.  Standardization of processes does not require that the firm lose its personality.  Rather, the mission at hand is to imbue the organization with its unique flavor and approach and to use process automation to develop and support consistency in the functions performed.

While cloud computing models allow accounting and finance professionals to work closer with their business clients, it is important that the practice look at those client interactions and develop standards for processes supporting frequently performed functions.  These operations generally represent the activities within the firm which generate the highest levels of profitability due to the consistency in approach and repetition of tasks, and are the activities to apply intelligent automation to first.  Those activities or engagements which represent the “one-offs” are often the most costly for the firm to perform, and therefore may not be the most profitable of activities and are certainly the most challenging to support with any significant level of automation.  It is in this area where AI will find useful value in the practice, where a more informed answer than simple process automation is required.

The surprising finding when looking at many professional practices with more than one partner/professional involved is that these firms often fail to develop even the most basic of standard processes which apply throughout the firm.  Rather, each partner or professional has “their way” of handling things, which challenges the supporting personnel as they try to deal with multiple working methods. The result is a lack of consistency in the service delivery to the clientele and reduced productivity and profitability for the firm.

The thing that these firms are failing to recognize – the light bulb over their heads that just isn’t lighting up – is that cloud computing and collaborative working models aren’t designed just to enable and facilitate a closer working relationship with clients.  They’re also able to be applied inside the professional practice, enabling a more productive and efficient workflow which addresses the strengths and capabilities of the entire organization. And it doesn’t stop there.  Businesses are relying upon their accounting professionals to provide guidance and develop controls and standards to support the client transformation from paper-based to digital operations, and embracing the entire realm of data and interactions associating with the business. Digital transformation in a client business demands transformation in those firms who serve it.

As professionals learn to go deeper in client operations they would do well to look internally, too, exploring how increased attention to process automation and consideration for the firm’s own “digital transformation” might lead to great profitability through market differentiation and improved performance.

Make Sense?

J

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Improving the Business of Art: Making Beautiful Business Decisions

There is a lot more to managing and maintaining an art collection than simply collecting.  In the art business, knowing where something came from, how it got to where it is now (and what it cost to get there), and keeping track of it thereafter requires software and systems to store and manage the information.  A professional art collection management solution will do much more than simply keep an inventory list of items.  This solution must store all the relevant information about the work as well as gather information while facilitating the various business processes relating to activities around the work. The first step to improvement is ensuring all the processes are being facilitated.

Acquiring the item, transporting the item, preparing the item, showing the item, maintaining the item, selling the item… all of these business activities performed must not just be accounted for, they must relate back to the work of art and become part of its historical record. Art tends to move around. Traveling from collector to collector or to different galleries, works of art may change location and ownership or custodial care frequently.  The origin of a work and the tracked purchase history, as well as the history of placements is among the critical information to be stored with each item. This most valuable data is part of the legacy of the work that any professional system should address. If information is power, then better retention and management of information regarding a work makes the entire collection stronger.

The location or exhibition of a work, its purchase history, the related museum and contact records – all this and more must be maintained and managed with each and every item in a collection.  Essential data such as provenance, condition and value is certainly kept for each work, but the key to making a truly useful system for collectors and artists both is the ability to get all the needed data in a single view or report.

Having the inventory information available for invoicing and reporting is one thing, but also being able to connect or identify individual works and collections with relevant contacts is surprisingly valuable. Tracking other information items like costs associated with shipping or framing, or storing both an appraised value as well as an insured value, provides for a comprehensive record of the work and its properties and makes forms and documents preparation not only more accurate but more efficient and useful, too.

Art businesses are like many other “product”-based businesses in that they have e-commerce needs, they build websites to show off their catalogue, they use mobile applications to display items, and they find much higher efficiency and agility when the websites and mobile applications work with the same real-time inventory data that the rest of the system works with.  The goal is to achieve measurable results through improved efficiencies, and that comes from improved information management and integrated systems.  Centralized computing models and connected cloud services establish the foundation.

Cloud hosting, remote access and mobile technologies, and location-based solutions are all part of the package for businesses involved in the business of art these days.  Implementing a hosting solution which enable anytime/anywhere access to business applications and information is often the first key to unlocking the better and more efficient art business.

Whether it is collecting, selling or showing, users involved in the business of art need secure access to all their information whether they’re in the office or not so they have the data needed to support making beautifully intelligent business decisions when it matters most. The rest is just pretty pictures.

Make Sense?

J

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Technology-Enabled Practice is Profitable Practice

A profitable accounting “firm of the future” is not out of reach for even the smallest of professional practices, because it doesn’t take a lot of people to develop a highly efficient and profitable operation.  The key is having the right business foundation – the technology and the concentration on structure and process – which will serve the business for years to come. Profitability is really about effectiveness and efficiency… delivering more value and doing it in a more intelligent manner than the next guy.  This is how the practice not only stays profitable, this is how it beats the competition.

Powered in part by efficiency created with technology-enabled business, professional firms find that they are able to realize increased revenues by billing for services, not by the billable hour.  Data processing and performing the “mechanics” of the bookkeeping process is going by the wayside, with artificial intelligence and automation taking the lead in these areas.  This creates the opportunity for professionals to broaden their scope of service and involvement with business clients.   The higher value work, the tasks that most professionals would rather spend their time on, is now available because the lower value data entry and tabulation is handled electronically.  When accountants are able to spend less time on entering information and more time on evaluation and analysis, business clients find greater value in the insight delivered from the engagement.

It is more than possible for the professional to develop new competencies in business technologies without having to invest the entire practice and put the client base at risk. Hosting and remote access solutions, for example, bridge the gap between on-premises computing and the cloud, delivering the benefits of mobility and anytime/anywhere working models without the complete transition to SaaS applications and web-based frameworks.  This allows the firm to streamline production by taking advantage of connected systems and real-time data, which is at the core of efficiency in business.

The small business market is the economic growth sector, and the number of opportunities being presented to smaller firms is increasingly significant. With the correct technology and approach, small firms are able to compete at levels previously available only to their larger counterparts.  The business of accounting is changing because the technologies supporting it are evolving more rapidly than ever before.  The firms that embrace these changes and use them to improve and streamline practice performance are the firms that will achieve and sustain the highest levels of profitability.

Make Sense?

J

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Big Data, Analysis and Business Intelligence

Big Data, Analysis and Business Intelligence

big dataThere is a lot of talk among IT professionals of “big data”, and discussions at many business conference tables center on how the organization might find greater benefit and advantage from the intelligence buried in the business systems and information.  It is a two-part problem, where the collection and the analysis each play essential roles in developing real business intelligence.

“So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data.

And what is complementary to data? Analysis. ..”

Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google and emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley
“Hal Varian Answers Your Questions,” February 25, 2008 (http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/02/25/hal-varian-answers-your-questions/).  BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS: FROM BIG DATA TO BIG IMPACT; MIS Quarterly Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 1165-1188/December 2012

The information technology and systems in a business support the operation.  Software and computers help people do their jobs, and the information collected in and generated by those systems becomes the foundation for developing business “intelligence”.   Today, businesses must reach beyond their own direct operational support systems and consider the full realm of data to be collected, including IoT sensor data or social media data.

Business intelligence is gained from the analysis of the critical business data – analysis which helps owners and managers make better and more informed decisions which are based on an understanding of the business and market.   Business intelligence was a term popularized in the 1990s, but the key was the analytical component (business analytics), which gained focus in the late 2000s. Today it is big data and big data analytics, where organizations are working with massive data sets not previously even imagined.

“…one of the most significant challenges facing enterprise IT teams today is how to efficiently support and enable the “science” of big data, while providing the confidence and maturity of more traditional (and often better understood) infrastructure services.”

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/26/hadoop-big-data-storage-challenge-overcoming-science-project/

The volume and velocity of information collection is ever-increasing even in the smallest of businesses, creating a great need for tools which can structure and correlate data so that it might render some insight.  Simply storing and managing these huge and growing data sets has become a challenge, and there isn’t one right way.

Once the business has the data, then it must find a way to analyze the data, which generally involves also applying visualization tools. Many IT departments are feeling pressured in the development of new skills and capabilities around data collection and management, yet it is more frequently the business user who provides the analysis and applies visualization tools to the task.

“Data collected by the Aberdeen Group, found that employees in organizations that used visual data discovery were more likely to find the information they need, when they need it. These same companies were able to scale their use of scarce IT skills more effectively.”

http://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/visualization-set-your-analytics-users-free#0vXrkWZbizxyutw

The use of business intelligence and advanced analytics continues to grow in every segment of the market – from small business to enterprise – and plays an increasingly important role in supporting business success.

Until this point, most businesses didn’t have the technology or the data to enable significant quality or business transformation, but the times are changing and deployments of data collection, analysis and visualization software and tools are expanding with it. This is a fundamental aspect of business digital transformation and fuels the next step, where intelligence is applied to conditions revealed in the data and activities are automatically performed guided by that intelligence.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J