On its own, the baseline data captured on the Service Portal can be useful. The Portal logs can be found under Service Portal > Log Entries, and some basic reporting can be found under Service Portal > Usage Overview. While the baseline functionality is powerful, with a little configuration you can capture and display more usable information. This blog post will share some suggestions for how to glean more value from the baseline data.

Organizations use data analytics in a variety of ways: A health insurance company may want a way to identify emerging risk factors for disease in its patient populations; a nonprofit that connects bone marrow donors with people requiring transplants may look for ways to slash the time it takes to identify a likely match; a national retailer may seek to better understand the shopping preferences and habits of its target customers.

On the surface, at least, there’s little in common among these organizations and what they hope to achieve, but they each must excel at the same thing to succeed: They have to be adept at organizing and analyzing data, and they need a data strategy that ultimately works for them.

Today, we’re in the age of usage-based insurance. With modern automobile technology and new data-gathering methods, insurance companies can answer many questions about drivers: How fast does a person accelerate? How hard does he brake? What time of day does she typically drive? Using AI and data analytics, insurance carriers can correlate this data with the likelihood of a driver filing a claim, leading to personalized pricing, safe-driver discounts and more.

Until someone invents a crystal ball, business analytics tools are the best way to achieve a deeper understanding of business trends, such as emerging opportunities and changes in customer expectations and habits. The latest BA tools also enable organizations to unlock insights that otherwise would require hiring data scientists.

Twenty years ago, investors and analysts asked businesses, “What’s your web strategy?” Fifteen years ago, it was, “What’s your mobile strategy?” Today, it’s, “What’s your AI strategy?” Artificial intelligence gives businesses powerful new ways to get deeper insights into customer experiences, needs, wants, habits, risks and more. Yet as with the web and mobile, recognizing…

Cities and municipalities face a number of tough questions as they try to provide residents with a good place to work and live. How much congestion and pollution are caused by vehicles circling the block as drivers look for a parking spot? Which intersections have the most near-miss accidents? Where is jaywalking common — and…