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Artificial intelligence (AI) is one?if not the?key technology of our decade. Technological advances in this field are not only fundamentally changing our economies, industries and markets, but are also exerting enormous influence on traditional business practices, many of which will disappear, while others will be transformed or completely reinvented.
There may be several generations that a KM system appeals to in different ways, but there are no generational differences when it comes to expecting high quality customer service and knowledgeable agents.
The consumer has spoken. Forrester Research asked 5,000 of them, “What created the biggest pain when you contacted a business for customer service?” They answered lack and consistency of agent knowledge, followed by the difficulty of finding relevant answers on company websites. So, what is driving this dissatisfaction?
Skills shortages continue to plague the IT sector, causing UK technology job vacancies to shoot up by almost 200% since 2020, according to BCS.
Not having the right skills or team is the third biggest worry among senior IT decision-makers in the UK, with two-thirds of technology executives (66%) highlighting that their organisation’s digital transformation projects are being stalled due to struggles in recruiting IT professionals with the skills they need.
Cybersecurity is the UK tech sector’s most sought-after skill set according to the Nash Squared Digital Leadership Report, with 43% of respondents reporting a shortage, followed by big data specialists and analysts (36%), technical architects (33%) and developers (32%). Other in-demand skill sets include network engineering and devops.
Sadly, there’s no quick fix to the problem of tech skills shortages. With the biggest cause of IT skill shortfalls in the UK being a lack of STEM graduates coming through the education system, changes to public policy are key. However, there are steps that CIOs can take to begin easing recruitment challenges.
One of these is to work towards changing the general perception of IT careers and giving people a better understanding of how varied work in the technology sector can be.
“IT often has the perception that it’s solely focused on the lone ranger sitting in a darkened room responding to the bad guys. In terms of attracting talent, this may not appeal to those who’re searching for a career that’s people-focused and revolves around being part of a team,” says Heather Hinton, CISO of cloud-based comms company RingCentral.
Hiring, IT Leadership, IT Skills, IT Training
European lawmakers approved two sweeping new pieces of digital regulation, paving the way for clashes between regulators and some of the world’s biggest tech companies over how the rules should be applied.
Developed by Zuellig Pharma, eZRx is ASEAN’s largest B2B eCommerce platform for the healthcare industry – offering a smarter and more convenient way to buy and sell healthcare products online, anywhere and anytime, versus reps visiting clients face-to-face.
As COVID-19 began spreading its tentacles through Asia, Zuellig Pharma, one of the continent’s largest healthcare services groups needed to ensure that medicines and healthcare products – from vaccines to personal protection equipment (PPEs) – were delivered in a timely and efficient manner.
Given the urgency, Zuellig Pharma could not rely on a manual system to place and process orders and returns as well as payment requests. Efficiency and effectiveness needed to be optimized further. With much of the world locked down during the pandemic, the number of touchpoints to connect with customers was also vastly reduced.
Zuellig Pharma adopted a transformative innovation to ensure that its 350,000 customers and 1,000 clients – including the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies – could have timely access to essential medicines and lifesaving products during this critical period.
And it happened to launch when the world needed it most.
A 24/7 lifeline
Zuellig Pharma provides distribution, digital, and commercial services in 13 markets across Asia, serving more than 350,000 medical facilities and over 1,000 clients in the region.
As COVID-19 cases escalated, the company’s B2B eCommerce platform – eZRx for healthcare practitioners, clinics, and hospitals – aptly enabled customers and sales reps to buy and sell healthcare products anytime, anywhere, without needing to meet others physically. It also reduced pricing errors and consolidated important information in a single location.
The solution is powered by SAP’s ERP Central Component (ECC), an on-premises enterprise resource planning system, along with SAP HANA data management software. With the SAP software, eZRx could integrate finance, inventor, and product data seamlessly on the web as well as on mobile devices.
Turning the tide against the pandemic
Deployed in March 2020 – the same month that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an international pandemic – eZRx was able to ensure the smooth delivery of PPEs and other crucial medical supplies including COVID-19 vaccines, enabling healthcare professionals to do their jobs safely during this challenging time.
Through eZRx, customers could also have “full visibility of Zuellig Pharma’s product offerings and self-service, without having to wait for a pharma representative,” said Daniel Laverick, the group’s SVP, head of digital and data solutions. “Sales reps could also free up their time to focus on more meaningful tasks as well as provide customers with an omnichannel experience, enabled by e-detailing.”
In addition, the company could now safeguard compliance with international regulations with a database mapping specific customers’ product licensing restrictions. If a purchaser attempts to access any of the items via eZRx that are not market-compliant, the products are not shown.
In 2021, Zuellig Pharma was able to automate 11.6 million order lines, reducing the manual ones in half, and generating $1.2 million in annual productivity gains.
The development of a life-saving platform in the COVID-19 era earned Zuellig Pharma a 2022 SAP Innovation Award, an annual honor commemorating organizations that have used SAP products to benefit both business and society.
You can read the details behind Zuellig Pharma’s amazing accomplishment in their Innovation Awards pitch deck.
Data Management
When COVID hit in 2020, Australian Dominique Cotte lost her job as a first officer flying 777s for Emirates. Like others in the aviation industry, Cotte has retrained as a cyber security specialist and is working in London for insurance giant, QBE. Cotte speaks to CIO Australia’s editor-in-chief, Byron Connolly, about her career change, how the key skills required to be a good pilot play very well as a cyber security specialist, as well as her ambitions to one day possibly become a CISO.
CIO Leadership Live
The French company’s downbeat debut is a sign that there are limits to the investor appetite for music-streaming services, even as such offerings have grown to become a major source of revenue for the music industry.
The three companies account for about two-thirds of cloud spending and are using their size to maintain their hold on the rapidly growing market.
Business analytics is the practical application of statistical analysis and technologies on business data to identify and anticipate trends and predict business outcomes. Research firm Gartner defines business analytics as “solutions used to build analysis models and simulations to create scenarios, understand realities, and predict future states.”
While quantitative analysis, operational analysis, and data visualizations are key components of business analytics, the goal is to use the insights gained to shape business decisions. The discipline is a key facet of the business analyst role.
Wake Forest University School of Business notes that key business analytics activities include:
Identifying new patterns and relationships with data miningUsing quantitative and statistical analysis to design business modelsConducting A/B and multivariable testing based on findingsForecasting future business needs, performance, and industry trends with predictive modelingCommunicating findings to colleagues, management, and customers
Business analytics can help you improve operational efficiency, better understand your customers, project future outcomes, glean insights to aid in decision-making, measure performance, drive growth, discover hidden trends, generate leads, and scale your business in the right direction, according to digital skills training company Simplilearn.
Business analytics is a subset of data analytics. Data analytics is used across disciplines to find trends and solve problems using data mining, data cleansing, data transformation, data modeling, and more. Business analytics also involves data mining, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and the like, but is focused on driving better business decisions.
Business analytics and business intelligence (BI) serve similar purposes and are often used as interchangeable terms, but BI can be considered a subset of business analytics. BI focuses on descriptive analytics, data collection, data storage, knowledge management, and data analysis to evaluate past business data and better understand currently known information. Whereas BI studies historical data to guide business decision-making, business analytics is about looking forward. It uses data mining, data modeling, and machine learning to answer “why” something happened and predict what might happen in the future.
According to Harvard Business School Online, there are three primary types of business analytics:
Descriptive analytics: What is happening in your business right now? Descriptive analytics uses historical and current data to describe the organization’s present state by identifying trends and patterns. This is the purview of BI.Predictive analytics: What is likely to happen in the future? Predictive analytics is the use of techniques such as statistical modeling, forecasting, and machine learning to make predictions about future outcomes.Prescriptive analytics: What do we need to do? Prescriptive analytics is the application of testing and other techniques to recommend specific solutions that will deliver desired business outcomes.
Simplilearn adds a fourth technique:
Diagnostic analytics: Why is it happening? Diagnostic analytics uses analytics techniques to discover the factors or reasons for past or current performance.
Starting in 2019, the San Jose Sharks began integrating its operational data, marketing systems, and ticket sales with front-end, fan-facing experiences and promotions to enable the NHL hockey team to capture and quantify the needs and preferences of its fan segments: season ticket holders, occasional visitors, and newcomers. It uses the insights to power targeted marketing campaigns based on actual purchasing behavior and experience data. When implementing the system, Neda Tabatabaie, vice president of business analytics and technology for the San Jose Sharks, said she anticipated a 12% increase in ticket revenue, a 20% projected reduction in season ticket holder churn, and a 7% increase in campaign effectiveness (measured in click-throughs).
As part of a program designed to accelerate its use of enterprise data and analytics, pharmaceutical titan GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) designed a set of analytics tools focused on inventory reduction opportunities across the company’s supply chain. The suite of tools included a digital value stream map, safety stock optimizer, inventory corridor report, and planning cockpit.
Shankar Jegasothy, director of supply chain analytics at GSK, says the tools helped GSK gain better visibility into its end-to-end supply chain and then use predictive and prescriptive analytics to guide decisions around inventory and planning.
Healthcare consortium Kaiser Permanente uses analytics to reduce patient waiting times and the amount of time hospital leaders spend manually preparing data for operational activities.
In 2018, the consortium’s IT function launched Operations Watch List (OWL), a mobile app that provides a comprehensive, near real-time view of key hospital quality, safety, and throughput metrics (including hospital census, bed demand and availability, and patient discharges).
In its first year, OWL reduced patient wait time for admission to the emergency department by an average of 27 minutes per patient. Surveys also showed hospital managers reduced the amount of time they spent manually preparing data for operational activities by an average of 323 minutes per month.
Business analytics professionals need to be fluent in a variety of tools and programming languages. According to the Harvard Business Analytics program, the top tools for business analytics professionals are:
SQL: SQL is the lingua franca of data analysis. Business analytics professionals use SQL queries to extract and analyze data from transactions databases and to develop visualizations.Statistical languages: Business analytics professionals frequently use R for statistical analysis and Python for general programming.Statistical software: Business analytics professionals frequently use software including SPSS, SAS, Sage, Mathematica, and Excel to manage and analyze data.
According to analytics platform company OmniSci, the main components of a typical business analytics dashboard include:
Data aggregation: Before it can be analyzed, data must be gathered, organized, and filtered.Data mining: Data mining sorts through large datasets using databases, statistics, and machine learning to identify trends and establish relationships.Association and sequence identification: Predictable actions that are performed in association with other actions or sequentially must be identified.Text mining: Text mining is used to explore and organize large, unstructured datasets for qualitative and quantitative analysis.Forecasting: Forecasting analyzes historical data from a specific period to make informed estimates predictive of future events or behaviors.Predictive analytics: Predictive business analytics use a variety of statistical techniques to create predictive models that extract information from datasets, identify patterns, and provide a predictive score for an array of organizational outcomes.Optimization: Once trends have been identified and predictions made, simulation techniques can be used to test best-case scenarios.Data visualization: Data visualization provides visual representations of charts and graphs for easy and quick data analysis.
Here are some of the most popular job titles related to business analytics and the average salary for each position, according to data from PayScale:
Analytics manager: $71K-$132KBusiness analyst: $48K-$84KBusiness analyst, IT: $51K-$100KBusiness intelligence analyst: $52K-$98KData analyst: $46K-$88KMarket research analyst: $42K-$77KQuantitative analyst: $61K-$131KResearch analyst, operations: $47K-$115KSenior business analyst: $65K-$117KStatistician: $56K-$120KAnalytics