Last September, I had the opportunity to attend Tech in Motion Chicago‘s Timmy Awards ceremony, where West Monroe Partners received an award for Best Tech Work Culture. The ceremony was hosted by 1871, a shared workspace for technology start-ups and other entrepreneurs to create, collaborate, accelerate, and celebrate new business ideas.…
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Some form of data governance is necessary for all organizations, regardless of industry or size. Data governance accomplishes many goals, from meeting regulatory requirements to fueling strategic initiatives that depend on data. While most organizations recognize the importance of data governance, they have trouble keeping momentum after starting. One issue is that data governance models are...
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Does data have your head spinning? Here are a few tips and tricks for successful systems integration in the Utilities sector. As the West Monroe team gears up to attend DistribuTech this week (Booth #2761), we expect there to be plenty of buzz around enterprise data analytics solutions. Through enterprise data analytics initiatives, value is driven at the data intersections across...
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We recently attended the annual gathering of utility practitioners at Utility Analytics Week in San Antonio. A common theme discussed was “how do we get started?”, “where do we start?”, and “how do we justify the cost?”. Electric utilities are becoming increasingly digitally-oriented and data intensive with the adoption of AMI meters, deployment of SCADA systems across the grid, and...
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Change can be tough. When a new technology advancement is implemented at your current employer, that can be even harder. Especially for those who have worked for years on a process successfully, the question always comes up “why change what isn’t broken?” This past summer I experienced change first hand, both personally and professionally.…
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Everyone knows ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.’ While that may be true for some activities, after attending the Tableau Conference, #DATA17, we couldn’t help but share some of the key takeaways. Tableau, a data visualization platform, has been an industry leader in recent years (as recognized by Gartner and other organizations), and is known for its design-focused data visualizations...
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The marketplace for business intelligence and analytics tools becomes more saturated every day. Between standardized reporting, ad hoc self-service visualizations, and predictive analytics, many managers and buyers are so overwhelmed by keeping up with product releases and understanding tool features that they do not have time to consider the pitfalls that can sabotage a successful...
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Having just attended IDC’s Tech Outlook 2017 this week at the historic Merchandise Mart here in Chicago, I wanted to share some thoughts and summary for those who were unable to attend. As we all know data is the life blood for most businesses and continues to grow in importance each day as technology evolves.…
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The global population of data is rapidly growing and organizations are finding themselves challenged with how to store and manage data in a way that quickly leads to tap into actionable data. Today’s business decisions demand more complex data models that precisely represent the characteristics of entities and how these entities relate to one another in the physical world.…
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Across all industries – from utilities to banking and from healthcare to education – organizations are tapping into unprecedented amounts and types of actionable “big data” to understand consumers and drive powerful engagement. This is possible through evolving tools that analyze and parse data into hyper-personalized micro-segments of consumers – enabling an organization to deliver the right...
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Recently, about a dozen of us at West Monroe spent an afternoon getting familiar with Kaggle, an online data science community centered around sponsored competitions. This was the first in a series of hackathons where we aim to expose ourselves to new tools and methods of data analysis. The Kaggle competitions range from the introductory ‘Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster’ to...
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West Monroe Partners recently hosted a round table in Seattle for local workforce, HR and technology leaders on the topic of the future of work. There was a broad range of companies at the table, including Starbucks, REI, Zumiez and Delta Dental of Washington. To start the discussion, we posed a question to the group: With the advantages of being a “digital” company so well documented (better...
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