“As if there weren’t enough jargons and complex terms to remember for an investor, you are telling me I need to now know about ESG and Climate Risk – You must be kidding me!!” – These are the exact words (with a couple of expletives, that I cannot quote here) – a senior fund administrator from a large investment firm uttered when we were presenting about environment aware financial risk management.

For some of the old-fashioned investors, who grew up in the “Wild Wild Wall Street” days, this still seems a bit farfetched. But you know what, anything that can make more money, intelligently in the long term is a good idea for all investors, investment managers, banks and consultants like me. So, hear me out – I may help you make your next big profitable move, be it investing, divesting, or selling a new idea.

Warren Buffett wrote: “Today our world is changing faster than ever before: economic, geopolitical, and environmental challenges abound. However, taking shortcuts is not the pathway to achieving sustainable competitive advantage, nor is it an avenue toward satisfying customers. In times such as these, a company must invest in the key ingredients of profitability, people, communities, and environment.”. I, for one, listen when this legend speaks.

What does it mean?

ESG? – The textbooks define it as a “a set of criteria used to assess the sustainability and ethical impact of investments in companies or organizations. Environmental factors evaluate a company’s impact on the environment, such as its carbon footprint, resource usage, and efforts towards sustainability. Social factors consider a company’s treatment of employees, diversity and inclusion practices, community relations, and involvement in socially responsible initiatives. Governance factors focus on the organization’s leadership, transparency, accountability, and adherence to ethical business practices.”

ESG criteria help investors make informed decisions by considering not only financial performance but also the broader impact and responsibilities of the entities they invest in. This is also one quickly becoming one of the parameters on which Investment Companies, Banks and HNI clients want their investments to be routed towards for a sustainable long-term benefit. Companies that prioritize strong ESG practices are often seen as more forward-thinking, resilient, and better positioned for long-term success in an increasingly sentient and interconnected global economy.

So making a profit while doing good is an idea we all can benefit from. But to take it to the next level, as larger banks and investment firms bring in these criteria as a deciding factor on some of their investments, guess what’s going to happen to the companies that adhere to the ESG standards? They are going to grow in value and profits. Making these companies great investments in the longer term.

How Do I know?

Base our investment on ESG factors you ask? Well, while some major investment firms have made it mandatory to check ESG scores while investing and consider Climate Risk as a part of their Global Investment Portfolio Risk Assessment Criteria; others use it as a tertiary decision driver.

Most rating agencies today including Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters and MSCI provide ESG Scores for publicly traded companies, though a standardization in the scores and its global applicability is something that the governing bodies including FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) in the USA and ESMA (European Securities Markets Association) in EU are working towards. A major step in this direction is the European Union Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (EU MiFID II) Regulation requiring financial firms to incorporate sustainability preferences into their advisory and portfolio management processes since 2022. So in case you are planning to also invest in European markets, now you have to know ESG scores of every company you plan to invest in!

ESG criteria help investors make informed decisions by considering not only financial performance but also the broader impact and responsibilities of the entities they invest in. This is also one quickly becoming one of the parameters on which Investment Companies, Banks and HNI clients want their investments to be routed towards for a sustainable long-term benefit. Companies that prioritize strong ESG practices are often seen as more forward-thinking, resilient, and better positioned for long-term success in an increasingly sentient and interconnected global economy. Whilst ESG factors are more wholesome and elaborately modelled, it is important to recognize that Climate Change accounts for only one of the ten ESG key themes as set out by the MSCI [ENVIRONMENTAL – Climate Change, Natural Resources, Pollution and Waste, Environmental Opportunities; SOCIAL – Human Capital, Product Liability, Stakeholder Opposition, Social Opportunities; GOVERNANCE – Corporate Governance, Corporate Behavior] but plays a significantly important role from a financial risk management perspective.

How does it impact me?

I can assure you, it’s going to impact you if you are an Investor, or a Bank or a Financial Consultant. ESG and Climate Risk aware investments are going to be tracked, appreciated and in some cases mandated over the next few years as financial risk reforms and directives like MIFID II become mainstream and while this is the more technical reason, I will also attempt to answer it more directly.

Its fairly clear that as an informed investor, good long-term investments is a basic, tried and trusted strategy. ESG investing will focus resources on scrips whose underlying companies that follow positive environmental, social, and governance principles. More and more investors are expected to align their portfolios with ESG-compliant outfits and providers, making it an area of growth with positive effects on society and the environment. And more demand means rising prices of stocks and hence more profits.

Banks and Organizations have also started to address a growing number of critical drivers concerning ESG. This new international and national legislation and regulation and the voluntary disclosure approach led by the Task Force for Climate-Related Disclosures (TCFD) in addition to Increasing public concerns and pressure from lobby groups, activists, regulators and investors.

A significant chunk of investment is already being made in the Banking and Financial Services industry, especially in the risk management area that addresses the ESG and Climate Risk related strategies and disclosures. This is an opportunity for consulting firms and individuals to build and hone expertise in the area and field for more regulation and hence more transformation driven work in core and tertiary capacities.

All and all, ESG and Climate Risk is going to impact all of us, one way or the other. Whether we take the opportunity, take cognizance and make the most of it is up to us as an individual, an organization and a community as a whole.

According to the IDC’s Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Spending Guide, implementing AI has become a necessity for businesses to become more agile, innovate, and scale. And it appears that more companies are coming to terms with this as global spending is expected to reach more than $110 billion by 2024.

In season 1 episode 3 of the Intelligent Data Podcast, host Arvind Murali and his guest Christine Livingston, Perficient’s former Managing Director and Chief Strategist of AI, discuss trends in AI, the value of big data and data quality, supervised learning, AI ethics, and more.

Data is the single most important element to the success of your machine learning program. – Christine Livingston, Managing Director and Chief AI Strategist, Perficient

Listening Guide

Data Realities for Implementing AI

• Trends in AI and machine learning [2:29]
• How cloud adoption is helping accelerate AI adoption [4:10]
• Real versus hype [7:45]
• Value of data in AI and machine learning [10:55]
• Data quality and governance [12:10]
• Three Vs: Volume, variety and veracity of training data [ 15:47]
• Avoiding inherent human bias [18:27]
• Data scientists and engineering skillsets [20:53]
• AI ethics and implications [25:22]
• Why are software vendors adding AI to their platforms [29:41]
• Intelligent automation [32:20]
• Conversation commerce use cases (Automotive, Retail, Healthcare) [34:37]
• Intelligent automation loan processing use case [37:14]
• Affordability and ROI [38:02]
• How to accelerate your AI journey [39:10]

Get This Episode Where You Listen

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review!

Apple | Google | Spotify | Amazon | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

Connect with the Host

Arvind Murali, Perficient Principal and Chief Strategist

LinkedIn | Perficient

Learn More About Our AI Solutions

If you are interested in learning more about Perficient’s AI services capabilities or would like to contact us, click here. Our experts can help you start implementing AI in a meaningful way no matter where you fall on the AI maturity model.

COVID-19 has undoubtedly affected financial services trends in 2020 and will continue to do so into 2021. Since the pandemic began, financial services organizations have been responding to the crisis with continuity plans to address everything from bankruptcies to people losing their jobs and ability to pay their bills on time. Now more than ever customers need to be supported with trust, transparency and data-based decision making.

In season 1 episode 1 of the Intelligent Data Podcast, host Arvind Murali and his guest Scott Albahary, Perficient’s Chief Strategist of Financial Services, discuss financial services trends, how data is influencing change in the industry, and what you need to think about as recovery from the pandemic begins.

Listening Guide

Financial Services Trends and Data

• Data and AI-based disruptions [2:14]
• Customer intelligence and the “Universal Banker” [4:03]
• Master data management and data governance adoption [6:10]
• How is big data being used? [11:12]
• How industry leaders are structuring their digital ecosystem [15:10]
• Robo-advisors and wealth management [17:40]
• Cybersecurity and data protection [22:59]
• Post-COVID advice for personalization and digital interactions [23:50]

Get This Episode Where You Listen

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review!
Apple | Google | Spotify | Amazon | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

Connect with the Host and Guest

Arvind Murali, Perficient Principal and Chief Strategist

LinkedIn | Perficient

Scott Albahary, Perficient Chief Strategist, Financial Services

LinkedIn | Perficient

Learn More About Our FinServ Solutions

If you are interested in learning more about Perficient’s financial services capabilities or would like to contact us, click here.

While Microsoft Teams was already gaining steam as a way to allow workplaces to run effectively and efficiently, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically increased the urgency for Teams for many. The benefits are apparent – Teams can be seen as the ultimate application platform – but that doesn’t guarantee that you will automatically get the most out of it. Some important questions need to be answered, such as how you are going to manage and govern it – and how you can leverage automation on Microsoft Teams.

Join us at 1 p.m. CT on August 13 as two of our Teams experts – Solutions Architect, Chris Barber, and Director and Microsoft RD and MVP, Joel Oleson – answer those questions about best practices for using Teams templates to manage your deployment and provide proven automation steps that will ensure adoption and governance of your environment.

Along with their knowledge, Chris and Joel will share customer examples, including insights from custom solutions we’ve designed for clients, along with best practices for leveraging Teams features such as:

• Classification
• Labels
• Membership management
• Power Automate flows
• Teams templates
• Graph references
• Cloning teams

Chris and Joel will also discuss ways to evaluate your Teams environment on a maturity scale and help you understand ways to continuously evolve the growth and maturity of your situation so that you continue to reap value and benefit from your deployment.

To sign up for this webinar, simply click this link and fill out your details on the event page.

Perficient’s Microsoft Teams Summit

Joel also recently hosted the Perficient Q3 Microsoft Teams summit, where a variety of topics were discussed by him and other industry leaders, including Perficient’s Modern Work Director, Ron Jones, and Microsoft Technology Specialist, Michelle Gilbert. Click this link to learn about topics such as how to empower your organizations with Teams, utilizing change management to realize ROI on your investment, measuring how your organization is using Teams, and how Power Platform can help you get the most out of Teams.

DevOps teams routinely deal with the most sensitive needs of an organization: security, governance, and compliance. However, not every organization is on the same page when it comes to DevOps, which can leave developers feeling overwhelmed and overworked.

Sonatype recently released findings from its seventh annual DevOps Community Survey that examines the differences between mature and evolving DevOps practices, but with a new lens – how maturity levels impact developer happiness and culture. Developers from mature DevOps teams have higher job satisfaction, company loyalty, and productivity.

The Findings

Security:

The integration of security controls into automated pipelines continues to be stronger in mature practices, although evolving DevOps practices continue to integrate security controls. Mature DevOps teams properly integrate automated security tools about twice as often as evolving development practices.

Integrated tooling provides detailed information about the application development lifecycle and therefore allows developers to quickly identify and remediate issues and vulnerabilities. For example, mature DevOps practices prioritize security, leading to fewer OSS-related data breaches – only 28% of mature DevOps practices reported an OSS breach in the past 12 months.

Governance and Compliance:

Forty-four percent of mature DevOps practices have integrated automated OSS governance into their software development lifecycles (SDLC), reducing the need for manual intervention. This also increases development velocity, with 55% of respondents saying they deploy code to production at least once per week, up from 47% in 2019.

Integrating security, governance, and compliance into your SDLC can be mandated or voluntary. The survey found that governance and compliance are the #1 motivator for integrating security into DevOps practices.

Breaches have always been a motivating factor for increasing security; although organizations want to get ahead of breaches, developers just don’t have enough time to invest in building secure code. Executives in mature DevOps practices are twice as likely to look at the integration of security controls as a competitive advantage. DevOps practices at these organizations are twice as likely to have automated governance and compliance because it’s top-of-mind for leadership.

Developer Happiness:

According to the survey happiness matters in DevSecOps – developers from more evolved DevOps practices are happier. Happy developers generally have the tools they need to do their job and receive adequate training to continue growing their skillsets. In mature DevOps practices, happy developers said there was little to no friction on their teams, while developers from evolving practices identified management as a key source of friction.

Subsequently, happy developers are 3.6 times more likely to pay attention to security and when it comes to security incidents, they are less likely to rely on rumors. They rely upon evidence from their integrated tools, security teams, and leadership.

About the Survey

Since 2014, Sonatype has conducted its DevOps Community Survey, focused on application development and security practices. This year’s survey was comprised of 34 questions of Sonatype’s DevOps community between Jan. 29 and Feb. 27. In total, 5,045 respondents from more than 70 countries responded to the survey. For more information, download the survey.

Hello again, and welcome back to part 2 of the “Creating Retention Policies for Microsoft Teams” blog series. Last time we discussed at a high level what retention was, and how it works within Microsoft Teams. This time, we’ll discuss where exactly your data is stored. So let’s start things off by showing you a breakdown of where each data entity is stored within Microsoft Teams!

Where is the data stored?

I’m so glad you asked! As you’ll see in the diagram below, different data entities will be stored in different locations.

1:1 Chats & Group Chats

Let’s start with your 1:1 and 1:many (group) chats. These are chats that you start not in a specific channel i.e. going to the “Chat” tab and starting a conversation there. Although the messages are stored within the Azure chat service, they eventually are ingested and journaled into Exchange Online for compliance purposes. So where in Exchange Online? I can tell you one thing for sure, your end-users won’t be finding it since it is stored within a hidden folder of the user’s mailbox. Each member of the chat will have their own copy hidden within each of their mailboxes.  However, the folder really only exists for data retention, litigation holds, and compliance purposes. So if the folder is hidden, then how do the admins find it? This is where your best friend eDiscovery comes into play. Within the Security and Compliance Center, you can perform an eDiscovery to find the contents of the chat messages. To do this, you’ll start a Content Search and then you’ll need to narrow down the search to look specifically within Teams and include the specific time and any additional conditions you’d like to set.

Channel Messages

Let’s say you created a new team along with a few new channels and chose to communicate with your team members there. When it comes to storage, messages within your channel are treated differently than your private messages that you sent within the “Chat” tab in Teams. These channel messages are stored in the group mailbox for the channel. You may be thinking “what group channel?” Whether you knew it or not, when you created that team an Office 365 Group with a group mailbox was provisioned on the backend along with a SharePoint site (we’ll cover SharePoint’s role shortly).

Images

Any in-line images that you paste into your chat will be stored within the Azure Media service (using Blob storage) and then just like with your chats, they are ingested into Exchange for compliance purposes.

Team/Channel Files

At the team level, your files will be stored within SharePoint Online. This means that any file that you attach within a channel will be sent to SharePoint.

Chat Files

Any file attached in a 1:1 or 1:Many (group) private chat will land in OneDrive for Business. So for example, if you were to go to your “Chat” tab in the Teams client and started a conversation with either one person or a group of people, and then decided to attach a file in that conversation, this means it’ll be stored within OneDrive for Business.

Voicemail

Voicemail is provided by the cloud voicemail service and the voicemail be stored at rest inside of the individual’s mailbox inside of Exchange.

Recordings

Microsoft Teams utilizes Stream for its recording capabilities. Just like with your images, recordings will use the Azure media service (using Blob storage) to generate the recording real-time which will then be encoded and placed into Microsoft Stream.

Calendar Meetings

Any meeting that a user schedules on their calendar will be placed into the mailbox of that user that scheduled the meeting.

Contacts

Contacts will be stored within Exchange.

Telemetry

Last but not least, we have telemetry. Telemetry data will be stored within Microsoft’s Data warehouse.

Why so many storage locations?

At this point, you may be thinking why the heck is data stored in so many different locations!? Simply put, Microsoft Teams is the wrapper for several different Office 365 services. Case in point, when you create a team in Microsoft Teams, you’re also creating a backend Office 365 Group, SharePoint site, and Exchange mailbox so this is why Teams needs to utilize those services to store data. As far as the physical datacenter location, Microsoft Teams stores data at rest in the following locations:

Where is my Microsoft Teams data stored?

If you want to see where your data is housed you can find this within your tenant by going to Microsoft 365 admin center > Settings > Organization profile. From there just scroll down to Data Location. 

Now that you know where Teams data is stored we can begin to discuss how retention fits into the mix. Retention policies can be used to retain your chats and channel messages in Teams. With that being said, try to remember where we said chat messages are stored. First, the message will leverage Azure’s chat service to store the data and then the chat messages will be journaled into either the hidden folder in the mailbox of each user (for 1:1 and group chats) or the group mailbox (for channel messages) for the team. For these reasons mentioned above, Microsoft advises that you use the Teams location to retain and delete Teams data when creating your retention policy. It is also important to understand that if the Teams location is set in your retention policy and you have the policy also set to delete the content after ‘X’ days/months/weeks/years this means the Teams location will permanently delete data from both the Exchange mailboxes and the underlying Azure-powered chat service.

Note: Any chat and channel messages won’t be affected by retention policies applied to user or group mailboxes in the Exchange or Office 365 groups locations. Even though Teams has chat and channel messages stored in Exchange, they will only be affected by retention policies applied to the Teams location. 

So now you know what retention policies are and where the data for retention policies are stored. I’d say you’re well on your way to getting retention policies set up within your organization. All we need to do now is discuss how to configure the retention policy and the potential paths your private chats and team channels messages can take once the policy has been assigned. We’ll cover both of those things in our final blog of this series, so be sure to check back shortly! I hope you have found this helpful with understanding the complex world of governance in Teams and I encourage you to check out some of the other security and compliance topics since this just scratches the surface of what Microsoft offers!

Spend less time communicating, but be better informed by utilizing all the features available on Microsoft Teams. We started by planning a strong foundation for our communication in Part 1. Now we are working within those channels to gain four key Teams benefits.

Why make these changes?

Before we get into what, let’s remember the why.

The Teams benefits we are adding are:

1. Time saved for all members of the team
2. A place of reference for decisions made
3. Visibility for members on different workstreams or those accountable for the project by not involved day-to-day
4. Ability to have continuous conversations with people in all timezones

And for all of those reasons, we are going to…

Get Information Out of Chat & Post Everything

Creating posts in Teams channels will change communication for your group. Chats cannot be the default for communication within a formal group or initiative. Instead, have a dialogue going within your channels. This change is the basis for these added benefits. Let’s dive into the opportunities to do this & why.

Start conversations in Teams

Always start conversations with a post in a channel where team members can be made aware and start to collaborate on the topic. When creating the post, utilize the governance established in Part 1. Use a heading, and tag appropriately. Do you need a response from a specific individual, or is the topic informative?

In my example below, I tag the “General” channel because I don’t need a response from a specific individual, and my group doesn’t have a channel specified for this topic (yet!). Always add a heading so people can know what the topic is right away.

Ask Questions

Ask your questions in Teams posts! This is a hard task because our human nature makes us hesitant to reveal we don’t know all the answers. Get away from that by creating a space team members want to ask questions because they’ll save time. We can do that by posting questions to start, even if you know they may not get resolved on Teams. For the issues which can, meetings can be avoided by handling the whole discussion via Teams comments on that post. If it is not, the nature of the post will determine how to escalate to the appropriate communication level.

Connecting 1:1

If only one or two people have gone back and forth on the topic, creating the post revealed only two people are needed to create a proposed solution to bring to the group. Connecting two people 1:1 for a phone call saves everyone else’s time upfront by removing a meeting for which two individuals can resolve and post their outcome.

Give the Meeting a Head Start

If the group is not able to make headway in Teams comments or with 1:1 collaboration, then escalate to meeting with those which have commented. The benefits of escalating in this way include the ability to identify the must-haves for the conversation so that when the time is blocked off on the calendar, it only has to happen once. It is an easy transition because the purpose of the meeting is right there on Teams, and the participants of the meeting are already aware of the topic.

Post All Outcomes and Decisions

Post the outcome of all calls. This is a critical piece of saving time! Skipping this step would result is a breakdown in communication and will take you twice as long to resolve in a couple weeks. This enables other team members to be informed without everyone investing the time to create the solution.

Continuing to post outcomes over time creates a source of truth for all past decisions. Then, members can utilize search to refer back to any decisions made, depending on your tenant’s retention policies. Consider creating a wiki for major decisions or outcomes if unsure of the retention policy on your own Team’s posts.

Create visibility

Posting becomes increasingly important if your group does not have the same working hours or is not co-located. No team members would duplicate work or not be aware of a decision made, even if they miss a call, because everything is in the channel. Adding sponsors (which are accountable but not involved within the team can be even more helpful because they’re able to find the information they need without a team member having to communicate it to them, taking away time from the initiative.

Try it out!

The way to create the best fit for the team is to talk through this with everyone. First, have the whole team read through this blog. Then, reserve time to work through these expectations together. After that, your team will be on the way to having more impactful communication, being a more productive team overall, and increasing Microsoft Teams benefits for your company. 

View Microsoft’s commentary on Teams adoption here, and hear them echo these key points. Read more of our blogs on Microsoft here!

Microsoft is going all-in on Teams, and it’s time your company reaps the benefits! So much is being left on the table, and more potential is waiting to be released. This blog series lays out the secrets to upgrade your team’s usage of MSFT Teams. Taking these steps will transform the tool from “just another chat avenue” to the foundation of work at your company.  

The first step is creating the Teams instance! Create Teams around an organization structure, project, or initiative. All three of those are appropriate and can apply to the rest of the blog series. Choose one that applies to you and use that for the rest of the steps. The remainder of our first discussion is how to set up that Teams instance for success.  

Create a structure 

We want to mirror the structure of how work is done in our Teams instance. This allows us to best plan how communication will happen within. A great way to conceptualize a team is by identifying who is responsible, accountable, informed and consulted (RACI) for all requirements the group has to the business. The goal is to identify high-level buckets the work falls into in order to create the most intuitive structure. 

Identify the Workstreams

Start by reflecting upon the different buckets of work for the group. We want to organize our communications, files, and meetings around those groups – they will become our channels. The forethought of how to organize communication is critical. This process is the equivalent of laying a strong foundation of a house. Investing the time in how to manage your communication upfront will save pain and more time later when working to catch teammates up, communicate decisions, or sending emails.  

 Example: Creating Channels 

This is not each person has their own channel. The goal is #collaboration. Try to organize by the main efforts or aspects of the team or project. If you have trouble identifying what these groups should be, think about how your team talks about the work. For example, let’s say you’re on a development project. Do you usually start with technical architecture? Then transition to communicating those technical aspects? And, lastly how to report on the progress toward the overall goal? In that case, we would start with the following channel structure. Rest assured, the structure should adjust as time goes on and your organization changes. See the following examples of what would go into those channels. 

1. Technical – “I ran into this error when trying to implement what we talked about on our standup. I’ve tried one thing and then another. Any other ideas?”
2. OCM – “Can the team review this write up of the changes end users can expect in our next release?”
3. Project Management – “Our status report is due end of the week. Could everyone add updates by end of day?”

The default General channel cannot be deleted. Use this channel if none of the topics doesn’t fit any others. If there is an active topic in the General channel, consider promoting to a dedicated channel.

Decide who needs to follow what & how to tag 

Once you have identified the channels the team is going to utilize, delete the others which may have been created. The goal of this planning is to take all randomness out of communication and plan how the team members will communicate. This will save people’s time when choosing how to communicate something and who need to receive it. If communications are always put in a certain spot, the benefit of using Microsoft Teams increases substantially because communications can be referenced and relied upon. In order to completely take out the randomness, talk through and set the following for your team.

An owner for each channel 

These people (ideally 2) are responsible for regulating the posts in their channel and making sure everything that gets posted there is resolved. The benefits of having channel owners are preventing ideas or questions from falling through the cracks, and having the guidelines set up reinforced so communication is planned. 

How to use tagging 

Let the team decide how they want to use tagging. The method my team found works best is if a response or specific action is needed, the specific teammate must be tagged. Otherwise, use channel tagging for informational posts that don’t require specific action.  The benefit of this is all teammates understand how to ask for what they need. 

Which channels members need to follow 

Have a conversation on who needs to follow which channels. This combats the pain point for Teams creating too many notifications & creating a lot of noise. Go through and determine specific channels members need to follow. This prevents teammates from missing important questions. The benefit is channel tags can be utilized, but are not limiting. That is because teammates should use direct tagging in channels to ask pointed questions. When going through this exercise, think about the “FYI” messages. In other words, decide which members need to stay informed on specific workstreams. If you are a smaller team, you may decide to skip this step for the time being.  

Try it out!

The way to create the best fit for the team is to work through this exercise with everyone. First, have the whole team go through this blog beforehand. Then, reserve some time to work through these exercises together. After that, your team will be on the way to having the foundations for more impactful communication, being a more productive team overall, and increasing Microsoft Teams’ benefits for your company. In part 2, we discuss best practices within channels to unlock even more benefits. 

Read more of our blogs on Microsoft here!

It’s no secret that data is a massive asset when it comes to making better business decisions. But gaining the valuable insights required to make those decisions requires quality data that you can trust. And to accomplish this you need a data strategy.

Without understanding your business objectives, identifying use cases, knowing how your users access data, and much more then you put yourself in the position of making decisions based on incomplete or incorrect insights.

Next month, leaders in the data industry will meet in New York City for the Strata Data Conference September 23-26 to share insights on how to implement a strong data strategy (as well as current hot topics like AI and machine learning, which need a strong data strategy foundation to build on).

Here are four sessions to attend to learn more about the elements of a quality data strategy.

Data Strategy Sessions at Strata

Foundations for successful data projects 
1:30pm-5:00pm, Sep 24 / 1E 10
The enterprise data management space has changed dramatically in recent years, and this has led to new challenges for organizations in creating successful data practices. Presenters, Ted Malaska and Jonathan Seidman, detail guidelines and best practices from planning to implementation based on years of experience working with companies to deliver successful data projects.

Running multidisciplinary big data workloads in the cloud 
9:00am-12:30pm, Sep 24 / 1E 14
Moving to the cloud poses challenges from re architecting to data context consistency across workloads that span multiple clusters. Presenters Jason Wang, Tony Wu, and Vinithra Varadharajan explore cloud architecture and its challenges, as well as using Cloudera Altus to build data warehousing and data engineering clusters and run workloads that share metadata between them using Cloudera SDX.

It’s not you; it’s your database: How to unlock the full potential of your operational data (sponsored by MemSQL) 
10:20am-10:25am, Sep 25 / 3E
Data is now the world’s most valuable resource, with winners and losers decided every day by how well we collect, analyze, and act on data. However, most companies struggle to unlock the full value of their data, using outdated, outmoded data infrastructure. Presenter Nikita Shamgunov examines how businesses use data, the new demands on data infrastructure, and what you should expect from your tools.

The ugly truth about making analytics actionable (sponsored by SAS) 
1:15pm-1:55pm, Sep 25 / 1A 01/02
Companies today are working to adopt data-driven mind-sets, strategies, and cultures. Yet the ugly truth is many still struggle to make analytics actionable. Presenter Diana Shaw outlines a simple, powerful, and automated solution to operationalize all types of analytics at scale. You’ll learn how to put analytics into action while providing model governance and data scalability to drive real results.

Visit Perficient’s Experts in NYC

If you’re attending the Strata Data Conference don’t forget to come visit us! Perficient is proud to be a Premier Exhibitor of the event and we’ll be at booth #1338 in the expo hall. Our experts will be onsite to strategize and showcase our expertise in complex data environments, AI, machine learning, and data strategy.

You can also connect with our team to set up a meeting, even if you’re not attending the conference. We look forward to seeing you.

I have been listening to an audio book called “Cell” by author Robin Cook. This is a medical thriller about a doctor, George Wilson, whose life revolves around an innovation that is devastating and plays a critical role in his entire life and the people he loved. A large company creates a smartphone app that acts as a primary care physician taking on a new role in the digital transformation of healthcare after Obamacare opened up opportunities for new enrollments. However, the story takes a turn when George discovers that all the patients including his fiancé have died in direct relation to the app as they are beta patients. George’s goal is to follow the truth and figure out the reality.

While I don’t want to spoil anything for you, what is interesting about this story is the digital reality of patients submerged into a digital app and their interactions. In reality, digital experience has been a priority to all industries including healthcare, retail, banking, and others. Patients want to have an app that keeps track of their health record and proactively provides them notifications on treatment options for health and wellness. Physicians want an app that has the ability to provide them knowledge base, reach out to peers upon emergency, or just use it to keep track of their patients. Store managers want an app that can keep track of their inventory and keep their store stocked with an ability to interact with their vendors for refill. Customer services reps want to know everything there is about their customers when their phone rings.

Knowledge is power when you apply it correctly

While the fictional digital transformation in “Cell” might have went awry, there are ways to make your digital transformation a success. Perficient’s Chief Strategist recently compiled an e-book that discusses “How to Make Digital Transformation Gains in 2019.” In it, they share their advice on sustaining digital momentum and building a foundation for future success. Here are some key takeaways where data platforms can support an enterprise transformation to create a customer obsessed digital platform that can provide AI driven insights for your competitive advantage.

• Start Small | Find the right use case for AI and/or digital transformation which will add significant value to the enterprise.
• Know your Customer | Master data about your customer is the key to digital transformation. No customer wants to have different messages in different devices about the same product. In contrast, high profile customers would like to have a personal touch in their interaction with the organization they do business with especially in retail and financial services.
• Architect & Build Your Data Platform | Data platform is a logical construct which gives clear architecture and governance instructions in hosting any volume, veracity, velocity, and variety of data.
• Governance is a key function of Data Assets | With self-service data, BI, and AI capabilities, Governance is at a critical juncture for a CDO to create the process to secure, monitor, and deliver data on time for effective decision making.
• Agile Data Delivery | If you have a culture of delivering products in an agile fashion, why would data be any different? A product which has several data points need to be considered an agile release as decided by the data patterns (e.g. Reference data release management).
• Internet of Everything (IoET)| Big data has become so mature that cloud providers provide PaaS options for streaming and analytics. Don’t waste time in building brand new ingestion framework or analytics framework. Focus on “what data” you are ingesting and “why and what” business problem you are trying to solve. Get to the data at-time/on-time using the available framework from Perficient.

Governance forms the framework for information, content, and knowledge management to operate. Establishing clear, common, and consistent models in healthcare upon which to ground governance components provides a solid foundation executing the management activities that enforce these governance requirements.

This ensures the consistency and relevancy of the information for the business – the ultimate goal of any enterprise governance program.

Information and data governance, and content and knowledge governance, are quickly becomingimperative for a healthcare industry that is both seeking to capitalize on the value of its assets, and that is committed to ensuring the reliability and integrity of these assets when used to improve care quality, operations, financial performance, or patient/member experience.

After all, trust in health information, an omnichannel driven patient/member experience, and high-quality patient care depend on it.

This blog was co-authored by Mark Steinbacher and Priyal Patel.

To learn more about the rebirth of governance in healthcare, and exploring the trends and impact on patients and organizational operations, you can download the guide below.

Of all the governance trends, none is more foundational and critical to the success of the governance program – indeed the organization itself – than the need for accurate, consistent, and relevant models that communicate the meaning, use, and residency of the assets of the enterprise.

Modeling not only addresses the integration and ingestion of assets across and between information systems, but also aids in communication both within a healthcare organization as well as in the organization’s interactions with patients, members, providers, partners, vendors, and consumers. The models provide a consistent basis for understanding and minimize miscommunications, thereby increasing organizational efficiencies.

Governance programs are adopting not just the classic business glossary, but information reference models that provide the necessary context for the information, content, or knowledge across business units, technologies, applications, and personnel changes. Governance is becoming the keeper of this common language in order to ensure the associated rules, policies, controls, decision rights, and processes defined to govern the information are both understandable and enforceable regardless of the area of the organization impacted.

This trend is further evidenced in the evolution of the relatively new application space of governance stewardship applications. These products place a great deal of emphasis upon the value of this common understanding and provide features and capabilities that enable a governance program’s ability to maintain, apply, and socialize these models.

This blog was co-authored by Mark Steinbacher and Priyal Patel.

To learn more about the rebirth of governance in healthcare, and exploring the trends and impact on patients and organizational operations, you can download the guide below.