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.

Retailers that do business in the European Union are settling in to the new normal of operating under the privacy and security provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation. In the early days, retail IT teams paid significant attention to the structure of their back-end systems, trying to understand how to modify them to meet…

Creating a solid use case for data is like cooking a great meal. You need the correct ingredients, or data. You also have to take special needs into consideration (is anyone allergic to any ingredients? is the data sensitive, subject to regulation?). With both food and data, you want to know where it’s sourced (is…

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s electronic logging device mandate looked daunting when it was announced. But now that they’ve implemented the necessary hardware and software, many fleet owners have found the regulation delivers a silver lining in the form of reduced paperwork and more data to make informed business decisions. Phase 2 of the…

Using data to improve operations seems like a simple idea. But many organizations struggle to achieve this goal because they have trouble clearly understanding how operations perform when their data is scattered across multiple systems. Even when these systems have reporting built into them, their closed and static nature makes it difficult to find the…

I live in Fort Myers in Southwest Florida. Our area has been experiencing a worsening water quality situation that has recently resulted in what is widely termed an “ecological disaster.” Large outbreaks of harmful algal blooms in both freshwater and saltwater ecosystems have led to devastating marine life die-offs and negative effects on human health…