Facebook’s IPO might be the blow to customer experience that brings the social media behemoth to its knees. Zuckerberg be advised – from its beginning to its pending end, Facebook’s strength is a derivative of its customer-centric core. Facebook’s box office IPO debut has a lot of people monitoring its increasingly pained stock price, but the real drama is months...
Read MoreGartner estimates that mobile applications will influence $15.9 billion of end-user spending in 2012. To take advantage of this, firms are investing to develop mobile apps. There are over 500,000 apps in each of the Android and Apple app stores, and more new mobile web applications are being released every day.…
Read MoreIf you are following the policy development of Opt Out offerings for utility AMI programs, two recent news items are worth noting. Within the last couple of weeks, the Vermont Legislature approved a measure stating that utility customers in the state who don’t want a wireless smart meter on their home or business can now opt out of the technology for free.…
Read MoreThe effects of the financial markets, new channels and emerging competitors, and shifting customer demands and preferences are just a few of the trends forcing insurance companies to transform the way they do business. Making the leap forward requires developing clear answers to some key questions: Where are the opportunities (product lines, sales channels, geographies)?…
Read MoreOne of the greatest strengths of SharePoint 2010 is the ability to integrate the platform with external systems. While Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is the main method for implementing external system integration, the ability for SharePoint document libraries to accept incoming emails can also be used. This feature was used to integrate a SwitchVox Interactive Voice Response (IVR)...
Read MoreHealthcare spending accounts for nearly 18% of the U.S. GDP, so it’s not surprising that the industry continues to attract billions of dollars in annual investment from private equity firms. Private equity interest in healthcare remains strong despite industry transformative pressures, reduced reimbursement and the uncertain impact of our evolving national health policy.…
Read MoreBig data has become a cross-industry term utilized by the capital markets industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the scientific community. Big data is used to describe extremely large datasets. Binary prefixes to describe the size of data have graduated from kilobytes and megabytes to data stores sized in terabytes, petabytes and exabytes (slightly more than 1 million terabytes) of...
Read MoreWhen business problems occur, the common response is to create rules and regulations to prevent that set of problems from happening again. Unfortunately, at times the controls enacted to remedy the problems become so complex that they create new, different and sometimes more profound problems. This can lead to a vicious bureaucratic cycle with even more complex fixes.…
Read MorePeople often use the terms data and information interchangeably, but I see them as fundamentally different. Data itself is raw, unprocessed facts. It is not aggregated, and therefore lacks context. Information on the other hand is structured, processed, aggregated and synthesized data to provide context. As we have evolved into the information age, we have collected increasing amounts of...
Read MoreWhile there are many IT services that our clients can move to the cloud, messaging seems to be most popular. Over a series of blog posts, we are going to share a few key lessons from cloud messaging deployments. Define your requirements up front. Get them clearly documented and then let them drive all of your decisions: everything from What security features do we require in our cloud...
Read MoreEvery organization in the world runs on spreadmarts. Spreadmarts are end user developed repositories of data built using spreadsheet programs such as Excel, desktop databases such as Access and reporting tools such as Crystal Reports. While these are great tools to have, they are not necessarily the best way to use data to make important decisions.…
Read MoreRecently our Managed Services practice announced that we have extended our capabilities to provide support for Microsoft SharePoint, disaster recovery programs, and software asset management. The fully-integrated suite of offerings complement West Monroe’s established FITservices solutions, which include service desk, infrastructure management, and advisory services, as well as full IT...
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