The Ledger

The Big Data, Little Brain Phenomenon

Data is now a critical tool for managing most corporate functions and continues to get bigger due to the promise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the ease of collecting and storing data. However, managers have been relying on data to guide their decisions without analyzing it properly. Data cannot give insights without being analyzed, and in turn, someone with the expertise to analyze data can’t find insights in just any data. By combining data and the manager’s expertise into a predictive model, finance teams are able to extract the appropriate insights and determine what data is not as important. The increased availability of predictive analytics tools show how crucial there are to an organization’s success.

Read More at The Harvard Business Review >

Quit Searching For Needle In the Haystack Data

When an organization is hunting for insights in their data, they typically don’t have a plan. They have their data scientists spend hours searching aimlessly through unorganized data for any insights they can find. Finding insights this way is extremely difficult, and does not allow the organization to monetize their data. There are three practices these organizations can adapt to drive the value of their analytics, and enables them to monetize their data- decision making, aligning decisions to business objectives, and determining the economic value of these decisions.

Read More at CFO Magazine >

Next Level Analytics Can Lead to Retail Innovation

“New analytic technologies are expected to radically change analytics – and retail – as we know them.”

Retail leaders are focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) tools because they provide better insights to optimize retail execution. AI can be used to automate customer data, upsell options, and pricing engines, to name a few. Retailers are already able to collect large volumes of transaction-based and behavioral data from their customers. As the volumes of data continue to grow, machine learning becomes increasingly essential to further optimize business processes and drive more impactful personalized and contextual consumer experiences and products.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

New Business Climates Require New Practices

There are serious demands being placed on finance leaders to generate top-quality business performance practices with major focus on planning and management accounting. In finance, the key performance indicators to examine fall under three main categories: costs, staff productivity, and process efficiency. It is tough in any organization to change business practices, but what you have always done may not be good enough anymore in this new business climate. Re-examining your processes means you will likely discover ways to create better information more efficiently.

Read More at CFO Magazine >