About UsThe Decision Factor offers insightful comments and observations on analytics—from views on new technology approaches and market dynamics to the latest industry trends driving demand for faster, smarter information analysis. This blog contains personal views, thoughts, and opinions from SAP employees, mentors, and friends working in the area of analytics. It’s not endorsed by SAP nor does it constitute an official communication of SAP. |
Posted by: Rani Goel March 29, 2012  Last month, I wrote an article about big data and how you can benefit from it, published in Perspectives, a TMForum publication, in time for Mobile World Congress. In the article, I discuss how an enterprise can derive value from all the data types they collect. Today, I want to cover the flip side: how your customers can benefit from all the data you collect about them.
Companies today amass vast amounts of data about their customers, hundreds of gigabytes of data flowing in from unstructured sources …
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Posted by: Russ Hill March 27, 2012  Advancing technology has created a flood of data, and many retailers are still struggling to turn that data into usable insight at the pace their customers require. The perception of big data—massive amounts of information coming from customer transactions and promotional activities processed online or at newer point-of-sale machines—has led to a compelling need for better insight and analysis.
With customer relationships increasingly driving sales and lifetime customer value, turning big data into deeper customer understanding has become the key factor separating retail success from failure. Retailers wake up in survival …
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Posted by: Swati Sinha March 20, 2012  If you do a search on big data, you’ll see articles about the three Vs of big data (volume, velocity, and variety) and two Cs (collection and consolidation). However, the most important V and C for business users are value and consumption, two things we tend to forget are the crux of solving the big-data problem.
Last week, I was at IDC Direction 2012, and Richard Villars’s keynote came as a breath of fresh air, as he touched upon the value and consumption of big data.
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Posted by: Steve Hamrick February 23, 2012  A case for the evolution of collaborative and social software
Six years ago, Harvard Professor and Enterprise 2.0 blogger Andrew McAfee theorized that emerging collaboration technologies needed to be “9X [nine times] better” in order to motivate people to switch from using email to collaborate. Yet even today, many of us suffer from email fatigue.
Why is this? Even with the advances in both consumer and enterprise social networking tools, email is still the fastest way to share information within any given organization or group of …
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Posted by: Paul Clark February 16, 2012  In a post last year (Are You Engaged?), I talked about the importance of systems of engagement with customers and the role that social media can play. So what do I mean by a system of engagement, and how can it make a difference?
Customer Engagement in Action: Retail
Like any business, retailers must focus on increasing sales and margins, while dealing with a dynamic competitive landscape. This involves increasing those metrics for every customer, product, and store, each of those requires a different focus. Let’s look …
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Posted by: Kurt Bilafer December 27, 2011  Remember the plastics scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate? At a graduation party, people are asking Benjamin Braddock, played by a very boyish-looking Dustin Hoffman, what he’s going to do with his future. Mr. McGuire, a big-shot industrialist, pulls him aside and tells him, “I just want to say one word to you. Are you listening? Plastics.”
I just want to say two words to you: big data. Exactly what do I mean? There’s a great future in big data, not just for enterprise software …
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Posted by: Ted Luchsinger December 22, 2011  I always seem to be writing my blogs in airports or on a plane. Sitting in my seat at 30,000 feet, listening to Arturo Sandoval seems the perfect occasion to contemplate the state of customer intimacy, what has been achieved, and what is still needed.
I wonder if my bank knows how much I travel? If they did, could they create an offer that I would value and make me feel good about the banking relationship? After all, in these turbulent times, feeling good about anything—much less your banking …
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Posted by: Pete Scholtens November 17, 2011  The consumerization trend is one of the key drivers of social in the enterprise. Today’s workers expect that the tools they use at home and on their mobile devices to be available at work as well. If they can use social tools to organize a softball tournament, shouldn’t they be able to use the them to make decisions and collaborate on value creation at work? But, there are challenges to providing consumer-inspired collaboration in the enterprise and folding these values into an environment where more factors come into play.
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Posted by: Holly Simmons November 8, 2011  Today’s social collaboration landscape is crowded and complex, and in this post I’ll be exploring key considerations for selecting the right solution for your business.
Many Flavors of Social Collaboration
There’s no shortage of options when it comes to selecting a social collaboration solution. Industry analyst group IDC, for example, offers seven different types of categories: team collaborative applications, social platforms, messaging applications, conferencing applications, integrated collaborative environments, supplier collaboration, and content management.
Similarly, industry analyst group Gartner has three Magic Quadrant reports …
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Posted by: Jack Miller November 3, 2011  Imagine booting your computer one morning and being presented with the three to five core tasks you need to complete that day. You click on the first item, and everything you need (tools; the latest sales report from your business intelligence (BI) system; notifications regarding a new CRM opportunity; an expense report requiring approval; and input from colleagues, partners, and/or customers) appears in a single workspace, where you can easily synthesize the information and take the next appropriate action.
Contrast that to today’s siloed work approach with several open …
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