Business intelligence (BI) reporting tools help an organization gather, consolidate, and derive value from its raw data. These tools allow users to analyze their data in-depth, improving decision-making at every level in the organization. Various BI reporting tools are about 80-85% similar in terms of functionalities and features. Different BI tools cater to different user needs like Self Service Reporting, Advanced Analytics, Enterprise-level reporting, etc.
There are certain expectations from a BI reporting tool when it comes to evaluating them based on the below-mentioned parameters:

1. Self Service: Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) is an approach to data analytics that enables business users to access and work with corporate data even though they do not have a background in statistical analysis, BI, or data mining.
An ideal self-service BI reporting tool should qualify on the below-mentioned parameters:

• Visualization & Intuitiveness: Ability to present KPI Driven Visual aids for quickly getting a business pulse at that time.
• Data Blending: Ability to join/blend data from multiple sources like excel and data marts.
• Report Templates: Ability to create report templates and reuse them
• Web-Based Modifications: Ability for end consumers/users to change the format of the report, slice and dice, and save it.
• Export Functionality: Ability to export data to PDF, Excel, and other commonly used platforms.
• Report Sharing: Ability to deliver a report to a mailbox or any specific location.
• Self-Scheduling and Refresh: Ability for user to self-subscribe to schedules or refresh reports on-demand/event-based.

2. Advanced Analytics: Advanced analytics goes beyond mathematical calculations such as sums and averages. It generates new information, identifies patterns and dependencies, and calculates forecasts.
An ideal advanced analytics BI reporting tool should qualify on the below-mentioned parameters:

• Data Capturing: Ability to enable processing and analysis of large amounts of data.
• Data Mining: Data and text mining may be used to find specific trends or pieces of data.
• Predictive Analysis: Ability to use techniques associated with data mining, machine learning, statistical analysis, and others to generate highly accurate predictions about future business trends
• Statistics: Ability to figure out what future trends or results might come about based on the statistics being reviewed

3. Enterprise level reporting: Enterprise reporting is the creation and distribution of reports concerning business performance to key decision-makers in an organization. This may include reports on metrics on key performance indicators or information curated for day-to-day activities. Various factors such as operational reporting, database connectivity support, and user authentication are essential from an enterprise standpoint.
An ideal enterprise-level BI reporting tool should qualify on the below-mentioned parameters:

• Data authorization: Data authorization with inheritance from business application
• Vendor support for tool: There should be easy-to-access vendor support for the tool.
• Pixel-perfect reporting: Ability to make reports which can be formatted in their components down to the individual pixel level

Let us consider 3 leading BI reporting tools and evaluate them based on different parameters.

MicroStrategy: MicroStrategy is an enterprise analytics platform that delivers Dashboards, Visualizations, Mobile apps and supports custom solutions.

Salient features:
• Reusability: Metadata created in MicroStrategy can be reused in the same project many times
• Supports Self Service BI: Supports Self Service BI along with other powerful tools to create reports/dashboards
• Supports a full range of BI applications: Supports a full range of BI applications from departmental BI (small workgroups) to Enterprise BI
• Massive Data access: Can access massive amounts of data from different data sources like EDW and Transactional

Tableau: Tableau helps in simplifying raw data in a very easily understandable format. Data analysis is very fast with Tableau, and the visualizations created are in the form of dashboards and worksheets.
Salient features:
• Supports Self Service BI: Designed from the ground up to support self-service
• Visual Analytics Capabilities: Provides robust visual analytics capabilities to enable data discovery with rapidly promoted roll up and drill-down capabilities
• Data Blending: Easy to use report data blending options facilitate merging multiple data sources
• Server Component Features: The server components provide scalability, access authorization, scheduling, and governance
• Distribution: Distribution is via a variety of client interfaces like Web Browser and Mobile

Power BI: Power BI enables users to gather business insights from both on-premise and cloud-stored data in a dynamic, interactive visualization at the low cost of ownership.
Salient features:
• Content Packs: Power BI uses Content Packs, which has dashboard reports, data models, and embedded queries.
• Custom Visualization: Power BI has a library of custom visualization. If the business needs are different, then so should the visuals.
• Access to a variety of Data sources: Power BI Desktop includes a huge array of on-premise and cloud data sources.
• Print Dashboard: Power BI provides a unique feature for printing dashboards, which can be handy in board meetings and discussions.
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The post-COVID world will undergo a massive digital disruption that will impact business processes. With so many people working from home, digitizing assets, moving to the cloud, and digital transformation (connecting people where they are using various channels) are becoming key priorities to companies entering a disruptive 2021. It is interesting to know that McKinsey states that there will be a new operating model where Business and IT will massively collaborate and become one and the same.

While going agile, becoming an API driven organization, and delivering data products have become the new normal for organizations changing their mindset and culture, they still struggle to understand “data-driven” decision making through advanced analytics techniques such as machine learning and centralized data platforms. Companies’ digital strategies must take a data-driven approach to provide meaningful insights at the right time to the right person in the right platform. I am outlining 6 topics that will become a crucial part of analytic product teams in 2021. Over the coming blogs, I will break out each of these topics and explain them in detail.

Analytics Topics to Watch in 2021

1. Analytics of Things (AoT):
   In a survey conducted with 620 types of IoT platforms, AoT seemed to an essential character and value proposition, according to IoT analytics.com. The most common being a mobile phone, telematics, digital twins, power generator grids, health diagnostics devices, smart cars, among others. Each of these platforms generates so much data. Without AoT, this data is just a piece of “Dark Data” waiting to act upon.
2. Virtual Analytic platforms (Single Pane of Glass):
   Every customer I talk to have at least 3 different analytic tools (Tableau, Cognos, Qlik, MicroStrategy, Power BI, Looker…) and rightfully so. Analytical tools are now readily available as SaaS services in app stores and can be spun up in minutes by a non-technical user. However, what this means is the ability for multiple versions of the same dashboard in multiple technologies creating confusion and lack of trust for CXO’s on their organizational analytics. The answer can be IT overruling and coming up with a single BI product or to have a single entry point such as Theia, which will improve the data literacy of the organization with a single pane of glass. Also, these virtual layers can provide a catalog of dashboards and reports regardless of the underlying producer of analytic dashboards with appropriate governance.
3. Self-service and Data Prep:
   One of the most significant pain points, as stated by Tableau, is the lack of a full picture of the data that users want to consider to provide meaningful Insights. To avoid wastage of time, analytic companies such as Tableau and Power BI released their own data preparation tools such as Dataprep and Dataflow correspondingly. These tools allow the analytic user to consider doing simple data preparation activities, including standardization, data cleansing, and pattern recognition by connecting the user with hundreds of data sources. However, be wary of using the data preparation tools to any form of unstructured data as they are not mature enough in that space.
4. Process Intelligence:
   While AoT is the capability where large volumes of datasets are analyzed to be useful, there is no purpose for this analytics unless there is an action tied to the analytics. Take a simple example of a smart thermostat, such as Nest. Nest regularly mines the data for temperature changes, people in the room, and appropriately control the room temperature with maximum efficiency. Also, using a mobile phone app, a person can track the decision-making process and the parameters for those decisions. This level of process intelligence can be automated (Alteryx coined the term “Analytic Process Automation”), which will simplify the decision-making process.
5. Business-critical Analytic Technologies:
   When a marketing team is building a CRM system to track their closed-loop marketing spend, they would want to have analytics over their marketing process, including segmentation, Clickstream analytics, and customer intelligence. These simple yet powerful analytics does not require enterprise data warehouses and complicated data models. They need the ability to hook up data in motion and create ad hoc analytic models and dashboards by non-technical users. Besides, intentionally, these analytic technologies deliver a limited set of visualization capabilities as relevant to the analyst users. Examples would be Analytic dashboards from Tealium CDP, Dynamics CRM, and Salesforce.com.
6. Cognitive Computing:
   Named from “Cognitive Sciences”, this is the field of analytics that applies human-like intelligence for specific tasks relevant to vision, speech, and text (commonly called unstructured data). These are compelling technologies that can take inputs in the form of natural language or machine vision and provide outputs that are relevant to a “context.” Take Watson Analytics, for example, which combines AI and analytics and delivers predictive and prescriptive analytics for decision making. Cognitive Vision (CV) has become a typical implementation pattern used in driverless cars and large machines such as oil drills.

According to Ulster University research, 90 percent of the data floating around in the digital world today “has been created in the last two years.” This means organizations that invest in data products and think of creative ways of Infonomics using Analytics can “Uberize” industries and can disrupt traditional ways of doing business. Perficient has practice areas that can help get to it faster. Reach out to us.

“Too weak. Too slow.” That’s what Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who thinks 15-20 moves ahead, says matter-of-factly to his opponents. It’s that sentiment that MicroStrategy President and CEO Michael Saylor used during his keynote at MicroStrategy World 2020 to depict traditional and outdated IT. The tech that’s been built over the last 40 years simply doesn’t cut it anymore – it’s too weak and it’s too slow.

Computers were 1,000 times weaker 40 years ago when most of the applications organizations use were developed and simply built for a different era. Saylor said those applications are “opaque, weak, and slow.” And even though technology has greatly improved, finding answers and insights is still a cumbersome process for many.

That’s where MicroStrategy’s HyperIntelligence comes in.

HyperIntelligence 2.0 at MicroStrategy World

Organizations have numerous transactional systems and the idea of either spending time and money to re-engineer them or do a “rip and replace” simply isn’t in the budget. But there’s a third option – HyperIntelligence.

MicroStrategy rolled out HyperIntelligence in 2019, but the latest release is faster, 100 times stronger, and is designed to deliver the answer before you ask the question. HyperIntelligence 2.0 provides quick, easy solutions across all your systems and allows you to take immediate action with contextual triggers.

MicroStrategy is able to deliver these types of insights through HyperCards and HyperVision.

How to use the power of the phone, the laptop to scan forward… and answer every question before I actually click. – Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy President and CEO

HyperCards

HyperCards are atomic bytes of information that can be injected into any application that’s built to be deployed on any browser (Salesforce, Excel, Outlook, etc.). They contain predefined attributes and metrics that provide an at-a-glance summary of a specific topic on a web browser or mobile device. And these cards can cover a wide variety of topics such as people, places, things, concepts, products, or processes.

HyperCards were actually introduced in 2019, but they’ve since gotten an upgrade in version 2.0. Now users can choose from 4 different card templates. There’s basic, ring, section, and matrix. Card authors can select the card template they want to use as a starting point, and then drag and drop attributes and metrics into the pre-defined drop zones. Card authors also have the ability to mix and match header styles when building a card. This gives them the freedom to combine elements from different templates and choose the header style that best fits their data and use case.

This range of card options also gives users the flexibility to create super simple cards with information that’s only needed at a glance to more advanced cards that have profile images and widgets and can be accessed via mobile devices via HyperMobile.

HyperCard improves applications you use every day

There are a lot of applications where HyperCards would be beneficial during your workday.

Email – Users don’t have to exit their email to find answers. Instead, the answers are delivered to your email platform. For example, if a colleague emails you about a product, you could hover over the product name and a HyperCard would appear with relevant information about the product such as inventory levels.

Website – HyperIntelligence uses proprietary analytics while reading a webpage as you hover over words on the page and can deliver HyperCards with information for that page.

Search – The time it takes to research an answer can be reduced from 20 minutes down to two seconds with HyperIntelligence cards.

Calendar – Users can gain information about the people invited to a meeting on your calendar. Imagine having access to relevant insights about a customer on your mobile device before your meeting begins.

HyperVision

HyperVision was rolled out in 2019 but is also seeing updates in 2020. This application allows HyperCards to be injected into Excel spreadsheets seamlessly.

During his keynote, Saylor described a scenario where a manager had a spreadsheet with 20 plus names of employees that needed to be reviewed one by one to decipher who should be promoted, who needed training, and who should be transferred.

Instead of leaving the spreadsheet to look up information about an employee, the manager could turn HyperVision on and hover over each name for the insights needed via HyperCards. And these HyperCards can be color-coded to help filter the information in the spreadsheet. This would allow the manager in the scenario described above to filter the results in the spreadsheet to only show employees who are up for promotion for example.

Intelligence is your superpower – Hugh Owens, MicroStrategy Senior Vice President, Product Marketing

MicroStrategy Cloud

So how is all of this deployed? MicroStrategy offers its cloud platform on both AWS and Azure and allows users to switch between the two or go on-premise or off-premise. Highlights of the MicroStrategy 2020 Cloud Platform are that:

• It can be piloted in a week
• It can be deployed across your entire enterprise in a month
• You can re-engineer legacy systems or spin up a HyperIntelligence environment
• It’s a low cost, low effort, and low risk

MicroStrategy World 2020 Bottom Line

MicroStrategy 2020 is smarter, stronger and faster. Deploying HyperIntelligence is an effective way to build insights into what you’re already using. Instead of re-engineering or completely replacing what you have, you can inject intelligence into the applications you use in your everyday workflow. The insights sit on top of the data you already have and HyperIntelligence makes it faster to get the answers you need.

It was exciting to see MicroStrategy 2020 presented at MicroStrategy World this year and we look forward to what 2021 brings. If you’re looking for MicroStrategy support or a partner, drop us a line or visit our MicroStrategy page.

The Disney Data & Analytics Conference at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort is being held in Orlando, Florida August 20-21, 2019.  This conference introduces attendees to the tools and training needed to integrate advanced decision-making techniques into business processes that center on the experience of customers, clients, and guests. One such tool that you’ll find at the conference is MicroStrategy’s HyperIntelligence.

Join MicroStrategy experts for happy hour at The Art Garden during the conference. Details and registration HERE.

Data That Finds You

This innovative zero-click analytics tool brings data to users. Instead of flipping between dashboards, web browsers, excel sheets, email, ect. to find information, you can find what you need wherever you are in your workflow. You can simply hover over a keyword in the application you’re using to gain insights.

This technology can be integrated into Office 365 applications, Salesforce, Workday, Power BI, Slack, and web pages.

How it works

A Chrome extension surfaces information from 200+ enterprise data sources and injects real-time, contextual insights directly into a user’s browser-based workflows.

Once you download the extension, HyperIntelligence scans web pages, emails, or web applications for relevant keywords. Keywords appear underlined and users can hover over these keywords to view consolidated, bite-sized views of information called HyperIntelligence cards containing real-time insights.

HyperIntelligence Highlights

• HyperIntelligence empowers experts to deploy contextual insight to any website, screen, wall, device, or application. Get answers in real time – no interruptions, no delays to your workflow and deliver insights to users within the applications they’re already using.
• “Zero-Click Analytics” is now a reality across webpages, email clients, CRM tools, productivity platforms and Office365 applications.
• Decrease the number of users that lack access to information. Insights are pervasive and accelerate decision-making with no analytical background needed.
• Receive a Single Version of the Truth – Multiple data sources are consolidated and a robust semantic layer provide a single answer across different teams and departments.

Meet the Experts: MicroStrategy + Perficient

If you’re attending the Disney Data & Analytics Conference, you’ll have several opportunities to meet with our MicroStrategy experts and learn more about how HyperIntelligence can help you gain better business insights and make better decisions. You can find us in our partner MicroStrategy’s booth #411 sharing demos and also at a co-sponsored happy hour event at The Art Garden.

Register HERE for the happy hour event.

Where:
The Art Garden
Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort
Orlando, FL

When:
Tuesday, August 20th
5:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Recently, at Informatica World 2019, I heard the importance of data platform in building AI capabilities for the organization. What is interesting is that Informatica, known for their products delivering the “Switzerland of Data”, is now using AI capabilities to enhance their own suite of products with CLAIRE capabilities. In further exploring a few other articles on the importance of Data, I also came across Monica Rogati’s Data Science Hierarchy of Needs and was impressed by the way she relates the AI structure to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

In a way, the “self-actualization” that Maslow defines as “achieving one’s full potential” is the AI capability. However, to get there, you need the basics of data platform foundation. Now an important distinction between Monica Rogati’s Data Science Hierarchy and my pyramid structure is the assumption that you would use the capabilities from software products such as Informatica which offers you GUI-based capabilities where you can focus more time on governance, analysis, and quality and less time on writing custom coding. So please consider that as you are reading this article.

Data Platform Path

FIND
It’s paramount to identify and clearly define the “use case” that the AI team is going after. Without a meaningful use case, just building machine learning and automation for the sake of exploration doesn’t provide any value. Once the use case is defined, find where the data resides in the enterprise or outside the enterprise (benchmark, 3rd party, etc.)

COLLECT
With commercial and open source tools available in the data marketplace, you can quickly build data integration to collect real-time or batch data into a data lake. Don’t overthink quality of data at this point.

UNDERSTAND
Once you collect data into a data lake, understand the data you collected by profiling the datasets and mapping them back to your use case. You can also define tags in your data to put a business context of your datasets. In addition, take effort to classify the data you collected into categories that make meaningful business sense.

INTEGRATE & TRANSFORM
Once you tag and classify your datasets, integrate data from multiple sources into one data model that can support your defined use cases. In some cases, this can also be enhancement of your existing data model to support multiple use cases.

ENRICH
Integration should also include data enrichment. So many open datasets such as weather, traffic patterns, currency, disaster, health conditions are available for the public to consume. In addition, third party datasets such as Dun & Bradstreet can help validate customer addresses.

SCALE
It’s clear that to integrate such large, disparate datasets and build data models out of those datasets, your cloud or on premise data platform should be able to perform at scale. So use performance tuning and storage/compute techniques that will provide on-time results.

EXPERIENCE
Good quality data doesn’t mean anything without showing results in a format that can be consumed by different audience levels (line level to executives). Reporting platforms such as Power BI, Tableau, and Microstrategy have been market leaders for a reason with their ability to build beautiful visualizations with streaming or large batch datasets. Hence large cloud vendors such as Salesforce have been acquiring BI companies like Tableau to enhance their visualization.

Defining Metrics

One other important factor is to define the metrics and measures clearly to take actions based on facts.

MONITOR
Building the data platform is not a one time activity. Data similar to infrastructure needs continuous monitoring and improvement based on feedback from business subject matter experts (SME) who also act as data SMEs. Therefore, as you build your data platform use monitoring services and build notifications and alerts based on thresholds driven by business needs. Additionally, you can rate your data based on the relevance of the datasets to your decision making process. This will improve the quality of the data that is important for the organization. This activity will also improve prioritizing critical datasets over others similar to putting tighter SLA’s on important systems and their recovery procedures.

AI & DEEP LEARN
All the steps above will lead into building Machine Learning algorithms and automation processes that will provide relevant opportunities and direct impact to your organization’s bottom line.

While the above sequence of events will manage your data throughout the lifecycle of data preparation, data security and data governance play a key role to manage the data lifecycle as well. In addition, Dev Ops will provide agility to building data platform to keep the business moving and changing as mergers and acquisitions dominate the current landscape.

Facial recognition technology is quickly advancing and going beyond the ever-popular security use cases. Now retailers can use it to deliver an omnichannel shopping experience. This is significant considering a 2018 Customer Experience/Unified Commerce Survey of top North American retailers found that 73% of customers expect order tracking across all touch points, but only 7% of retailers can actually provide a complete unified commerce experience. By pairing facial recognition software with an open BI platform like MicroStrategy, you can not only deliver personalized omnichannel purchase history, but also cross sell recommendations.

Facial Recognition and MicroStrategy for Retail

Imagine a preferred customer walks into your store looking for a shirt and tie to go with a sport coat they recently purchased, but can’t quite remember the exact color and pattern.  Instead of having to guess or wait until the customer returns home, they can stand in front of a kiosk that will instantly pull up purchase history along with personalized recommendations. The shopper can then use this self service interface to locate items or alert a store associate for assistance. The result is a differentiated shopping experience, a more satisfied shopper, and a more informed store associate. Watch the video below to see how it works. 

Our MicroStrategy practice has been working diligently for 14 years to help customers maximize their business intelligence investments and our efforts are showing. We’ve recently garnered the MicroStrategy 2019 North America Partner of the Year award as well as praise from the platform’s CEO for our expertise and impact on our customers.

The Perficient team is truly unique in that they bring more than just MicroStrategy implementation expertise to the table. They also have an incredible breadth of knowledge across strategy, data, and cloud solutions and a deep partnership network, which enhances our ability to jointly deliver innovative impactful solutions to the market.

– Michael J. Saylor – President, Chairman of the Board, and CEO, MicroStrategy Incorporated

We’re very proud of our achievements and can’t wait to continue to share our trusted expertise. Find out more about what makes us an award-winning preferred MicroStrategy partner in the video below.

Kevin Rosenfeld, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Intelligence at Alliance Bernstein, presented on their journey to mobile with key insights.

Goal: find tends within Alliance Bernstein and get them to the right people

This will walk through the AB Simon application. What it is and some tips or aha moments.

Key Features:

• • Read and Write to Salesforce
  • Integrate to 3rd party data sources

• • AB purchases a lot of data from 3rd parties.
  • Connect it or integrate it smoothly.  Make it part of the whole. It may look like it’s CRM data.
• Content Library:bring in all the information about key topics
• Self-Service Intelligence
  • Give users the ability to get answers themselves
  • Unintended consequence: change their thought process around data.  Once they got access to the data, they then wanted to share it with others.  It’s hard to get Sales excited about technology but that wasn’t the case with AB Simon

Life Before Simon

Used to send all this information to Sales in email. Data came via email from a lot of sources.

• Linked In
• Morgan Stanley
• UBS
• LPL Financial
• Salesforce
• MicroStrategy
• Range of other internal client data source

Opportunity

This became an opportunity to centralize the data and get it right.

1. Centralization of data makes it easy to access the most important data
2. SSO to one application (via fingerprint)
3. Customized around ABs business
4. Do it in mobile

Simon wanted to be:

• Easy to access
• Simple to use
• Available anytime and anywhere
• Accurate data
• Actionable Insights
• In other words, they wanted to be like the weather app
  • Data comes from a wide range of sources
  • consolidates it all
  • Makes it easy to interpret the data
  • Relevant and actionable information

The Journey

• Took this and presented it.  Got a lot of people who loved the idea
• Business proposal showed the value
• Had a hard time getting a check

The solution: Had to build something with them first.  In partnership with MicroStrategy they built a POC app.  It changed the game.  They wanted it and were willing to fund it.

Aha Moment: Need to give your users something to touch

Constructing the Team

• Gained Executive Sponsors
• Created Advisory Council
  • Worked hard with sales folks to get an idea of what they needed. This app needed to be theirs
• Got the IT folks in line
• Found MicroStrategy expertise in Perficient
  • This was key.  Needed both skills and capacity

Timeline

1. Start in September 2016
2. Wireframe prototype by March 2017
3. Pilot launched in August 2017
4. Simon live in October 2017

Lesson Learned: unless you are prepared to do this in house, just get someone else to do it.

Results

Enhance Data Entry: The approach was that any data entered gave you something in return.

• 68 of meetings are entered in advance vs 22% pre-simon
• Meetings are entered on average 5 days prior to the meeting. Pre-Simon average was 9 days post meeting

Increase Operating Efficiencies

• Eliminated one hour per day of admin work. Resulting in a 10% increase in client engagement activities
• External have increased activity with Focus FA’s (58% of total sales)
• Utilization of Marketing content and 3rd party purchased data has increased exponentially

Improved Sales Results

• YoY sales conversion rate increased 6%
• Average meeting impact increased 7%
• Tier 1 Simon users average YTD sales increased 3X more than tier 2 and tier 3 users

Continued Maturation of SIMON

Realized Benefits

• Improved engagement success rates
• enriched quality of data being recorded
• Maximizwd ROI of data and content
• Optimized territory management
• Enhanced data consumption and distribution methods

Planned Enhancements

• Auto meeting scheduler
• Location based digital marketing
• Predictive leads
• Personalized user experience
• Enhanced visualization capabilities
• Pro-active alerts

And Beyond

• IloT
• AI
• Machine Learning
• Virtual / Augmented reality
• Big Data

When it comes to business intelligence, where do the experts go to learn? The answer is Perficient.

Since the SIMON app launched, Perficient has been on the road with AllianceBernstein and MicroStrategy sharing how to turn analytics into action. At conferences and private events all around the country, the past few months have been full of onsite opportunities to strategize with our experts and participate in demos showcasing proven ways to advance analytics, mobility, cloud, AI, and augmented reality.

Learn more about SIMON app

MicroStrategy World 2019

Credit: MicroStrategy

Perficient named as MicroStrategy’s North American Partner of the Year for 2019 at MicroStrategy World.

As the 2019 MicroStrategy North America Partner of the Year and a Gold Sponsor of MicroStrategy World 2019, we’re not only exhibiting at booth #300 in the expo hall, we’re also taking the stage four times:  

1. Perficient: Artificial Intelligence: A deeper look at the next wave of digital transformation

Artificial intelligence is poised to rapidly disrupt and transform industries much in the same way digital transformation has impacted our world. Gartner estimates that only 4% of enterprises have invested and/or deployed artificial intelligence in their organizations, with 21% of CIOs actively planning or experimenting with AI. In this session, we will take a deeper look at artificial intelligence, further defining the nebulous concept, highlighting capabilities, and identifying opportunities to introduce artificial intelligence to your customers and move beyond a PoC.

2. Perficient: Enabling the Intelligent Enterprise

The Intelligent Enterprise is the ultimate data-driven organization. It anticipates constantly changing challenges and turns them into opportunity. MicroStrategy provides a range of tools and capabilities to meet this need head on. But how do you get there? What steps do you take to get on the path and achieve results? What best practices should you follow to avoid the minefields create a scalable and insightful intelligent enterprise? Perficient will outline how to create the Intelligent enterprise and lay out what you can do to achieve higher value as quickly as possible.

3. Perficient: Optimizing healthcare operations with mobile analytics

As Fee for Value takes hold in healthcare, hospitals and integrated delivery networks are highly motivated toward increasing productivity and utilization—and reducing cost. Nursing and Operations leaders are constantly challenged to find the correct ratio of staff to patient volumes. But mobile predictive modeling analytics that allow volume and resource matching (inpatient and ambulatory) can solve this ongoing challenge in healthcare. Delivering mobile analytics tools to the fingertips of healthcare leadership provides the ability to proactively manage the effect of increased census on patient volumes, patient movement, labor costs, and financials. In fact, it’s critical to achieving the triple aim (cost, quality, outcomes).

4. Automated Insights and the Final Frontier in Sales Analytics: Using NLG to complete the last mile in BI

Perficient and Automated Insights are making the incorporation of data into sales teams’ day-to-day radically easier. Using natural language generation (NLG) technology, sales teams are empowered with analytics that deliver clear, actionable intelligence, resulting in better business outcomes. In this session, we’ll share how an innovative combination of NLG and MSTR technologies converts business data into action-oriented information that’s quick and easy for busy sales teams and executives to consume within the workflows and applications they already use every day.

Learn more about the MicroStrategy World 2019 sessions

SIMON App on Stage at Dreamforce 2018

SIMON was so impactful that AllianceBernstein was invited to share the app with the Salesforce ecosystem at Dreamforce 2018 in a session titled Best Practices When Going Mobile with MicroStrategy which featured Kevin Rosenfeld, Alliance Bernstein’s SVP and Head of Business Intelligence. Listen to the session here

Learn how AllianceBernstein’s Mobile App Empowers Sales Teams in Real Time

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018

Credit: Gartner

Jim Butz is a MicroStrategy BI expert at Perficient and has been helping revolutionize the way end-users interact with BI, reporting and analytics tools. Butz was invited to speak about augmented analytics at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018 in Orlando, Florida. His presentation included live demonstrations of how organizations can use MicroStrategy to increase analytics adoption among employees and how to implement augmented reality, chatbots, voice, and natural language technology into your organization.

Learn more about the power of Augmented Analytics

Where would you like to see Perficient next? Let us know in the comments who would benefit most from seeing a live demo of the power of Perficient combined with MicroStrategy.

The MicroStrategy World 2019 agenda is out and it’s time to start planning your conference schedule (it’s easy with the MicroStrategy mobile app). Among the many can’t-miss sessions, there are two customer sessions you should make time for: AllianceBernstein and UBS. These two key customers will share the innovative ways they have transformed their organizations by leveraging MicroStrategy for mobile use and the financial industry.

A MicroStrategy Mobile Platform Use Case

AllianceBernstein (AB), a leading global asset management firm, co-developed an intuitive, unique sales app that leverages MicroStrategy on top of Salesforce CRM data to give the AB sales team real-time, mobile-first information. This app earned AB a coveted MicroStrategy Customer Award for Innovation. Attend their session on Tuesday.

CUSTOMER: AllianceBernstein: Going Mobile with MicroStrategy
Tuesday | 4:15 pm – 5:00 pm | 227 ABC
Speaker: Kevin Rosenfeld SVP/Managing Director, Head of Business Intelligence, AB (AllianceBernstein)

(AllianceBernstein) uses Salesforce.com as their CRM, and have historically leveraged MicroStrategy for sales reporting and “light” business analytics. As technology has advanced, specifically mobile, they identified an opportunity to better connect the CRM and Business Intelligence efforts with the MicroStrategy Mobile Platform. The result is SIMON—a point-of-sale application for the iPad that provides sales teams with a customer facing tool kit to enrich the client engagement experience. This session will introduce Simon and share best practices and lessons learned from AB’s journey to mobile. Attend this session to learn about:
•        The impact SIMON has on their business
•        Best practices in project initiation, funding, choosing technology partners, and gaining internal support

MicroStrategy in the Financial Industry

UBS, an investment banking company, invested in MicroStrategy to get more out of their business intelligence. Learn more out this financial industry use case by attending their session on Wednesday.

CUSTOMER: UBS: How a Financial Institution Uses MicroStrategy
Wednesday | 2:00 pm – 2:45 pm | 227 ABC
Speaker: Scott Cooke Executive Director, UBS

Learn how UBS uses MicroStrategy to monitor banking data and generate dashboards/reports that address three key goals: (1) transparency for senior management, (2) sales/product reporting, and (3) process improvements that allow business analysts to focus on what’s important: growth. This session will give an overview of UBS’s journey, and focus on:
•        The goals and process of their transformation
•        The challenges they faced
•        How they built their BI solution
•        Plans for the future

Come Visit Perficient’s Experts

And when you’re not in sessions, don’t forget to come visit us! Perficient is proud to be a Gold sponsor of the event and we’ll be at booth #300 in the expo hall. Our experts will be onsite to strategize and present demos showcasing proven ways to advance analytics, mobility, cloud, AI, and augmented reality.

You can also connect with our team to set up a meeting. We look forward to seeing you at World!

MicroStrategy World is around the corner, happening February 4-6th in Phoenix. With the recent release of MicroStrategy 2019 and O365 integration, it will be an exciting education-packed week! Perficient is proud to be a Gold sponsor of the event. We’ll be exhibiting at booth #300 in the expo hall where our experts will be onsite to strategize and present demos showcasing proven ways to advance analytics, mobility, cloud, AI, and augmented reality.

Our experts will also be sharing their stories in four can’t-miss sessions throughout the conference.

Our Sessions

Perficient: Artificial Intelligence: A deeper look at the next wave of digital transformation

Artificial intelligence is poised to rapidly disrupt and transform industries much in the same way digital transformation has impacted our world. Gartner estimates that only 4% of enterprises have invested and/or deployed artificial intelligence in their organizations, with 21% of CIOs actively planning or experimenting with AI. In this session, we will take a deeper look at artificial intelligence, further defining the nebulous concept, highlighting capabilities, and identifying opportunities to introduce artificial intelligence to your customers and move beyond a PoC.

Attend this session to learn best practices for:

• Building your organization’s roadmap to AI.

• Scaling small tests into meaningful capabilities.

• Overcoming roadblocks experienced by most organizations.

Session Date: Wednesday, February 6^th

Session Time: 2:00PM-2:45PM

Location: Phoenix Convention Center, North building 225AB

Speaker: Christine Livingston, Director, AI – Perficient

Perficient: Enabling the Intelligent Enterprise

The Intelligent Enterprise is the ultimate data-driven organization. It anticipates constantly changing challenges and turns them into opportunity. MicroStrategy provides a range of tools and capabilities to meet this need head on. But how do you get there? What steps do you take to get on the path and achieve results? What best practices should you follow to avoid the minefields create a scalable and insightful intelligent enterprise? Perficient will outline how to create the Intelligent enterprise and lay out what you can do to achieve higher value as quickly as possible.

Session Date: Tuesday, February 5^th

Session Time: 2:00PM-2:45PM

Location: Phoenix Convention Center, North building 229B

Speakers: Mike Porter, Principal, Strategic Advisors – Perficient; Steve Thompson, Director, MicroStrategy Solutions – Perficient

Perficient: Optimizing healthcare operations with mobile analytics

As Fee for Value takes hold in healthcare, hospitals and integrated delivery networks are highly motivated toward increasing productivity and utilization—and reducing cost. Nursing and Operations leaders are constantly challenged to find the correct ratio of staff to patient volumes. But mobile predictive modeling analytics that allow volume and resource matching (inpatient and ambulatory) can solve this ongoing challenge in healthcare. Delivering mobile analytics tools to the fingertips of healthcare leadership provides the ability to proactively manage the effect of increased census on patient volumes, patient movement, labor costs, and financials. In fact, it’s critical to achieving the triple aim (cost, quality, outcomes).

Attend this session to learn how organizations can:

• Deliver mobile analytics tools to address healthcare challenges.

• Tackle operational opportunities in today’s integrated delivery networks.

• Achieve a return on their investment with MicroStrategy.

Session Date: Wednesday, February 6^th

Session Time: 9:00AM-9:45AM

Location: Phoenix Convention Center, North building 224A

Speaker: Juliet Silver, Chief Strategist, Health Sciences – Perficient

Automated Insights and the Final Frontier in Sales Analytics: Using NLG to complete the last mile in BI

Perficient and Automated Insights are making the incorporation of data into sales teams’ day-to-day radically easier. Using natural language generation (NLG) technology, sales teams are empowered with analytics that deliver clear, actionable intelligence, resulting in better business outcomes. In this session, we’ll share how an innovative combination of NLG and MSTR technologies converts business data into action-oriented information that’s quick and easy for busy sales teams and executives to consume within the workflows and applications they already use every day.

Session Date: Wednesday, February 6^th

Session Time: 2:00PM-2:45PM

Location: Phoenix Convention Center, North building 221B

Speakers:  Locky Stewart Strategic Partnerships & Alliances – Automated Insights; Roberto Trevino Director of Program Innovation, Perficient

Perficient acquired Southport Services Group in April last year recognizing the enterprise imperative of making data valuable. With the acquisition, we’ve extended our capabilities to deliver business intelligence solutions with an award-winning team – and augmented those capabilities with our end-to-end digital transformation solutions.

Will you be at MicroStrategy World? Reach out to connect with our team.

If you’re attending NRF 2019, be sure to stop by the MicroStrategy booth (#1955) to meet with Perficient experts Jim Butz, MicroStrategy Practice General Manager, and Kevin Bauer, Digital Marketing Practice Director, as they showcase demos and retail expertise. The demos will highlight augmented analytics, chatbots, voice, natural language technology, digital intelligence, digital marketing analytics, and data-driven omnichannel experience.

In addition to meeting our experts, you’ll get a chance to connect with our partners at MicroStrategy to see their innovative solutions in action and experience their HyperIntelligence, which delivers contextual insights you need on any web content, screen, wall, device, or application. In fact, MicroStrategy just released MicroStrategy 2019 on Monday, the first and only enterprise platform for HyperIntelligence.

My colleague Erin Moloney, director, Perficient Digital, further introduces our speakers from Perficient and shares more details on their sessions here.

Our Demo Sessions:

• Monday, January 14th @ 10:00 AM
• Tuesday, January 15th @ 9:30 AM

Where:

Javits Center, NYC
MicroStrategy Booth #1955

We hope to see you there!

In the meantime, feel free to check out the below video to see what we’re working on with MicroStrategy.