The quest for hyper targeted messaging is nothing new. It is of utmost importance – and refining by the minute. The goal of course is to give the prospect the information they need, at the precise time that they need it – aka matching the buyer’s journey. When Marketers are successful, a prospect is marketing qualified, then sales qualified and the closing process ensues.

But, who do prospects really buy from? Do they buy from a brand? Or do they buy from a campaign topic? Or maybe, they buy from the irrefutable value that is presented by the Marketing team.

Actually, it is none of the above –

People Buy from People

More precisely, prospects buy from people whom they trust to complete the service or provide the product needed, period. Certainly technical and functional value-add is extremely important in a decision, but in a competitive environment personal relationships win the deal.

Trust Factor Marketing is a process by which personal relationship value is apparently as important as product/service value. It starts before Sales and Marketing qualification; it starts as soon as communication starts.

Here are suggestions to get started with Trust Factor Marketing and personalize at a level higher than any targeting metric can provide.

1. Research to understand the business and personal drivers of a prospect. Is there a big societal improvement focus within their culture or maybe a winner-takes-all personality? Big difference in approach and messaging!
2. How do your business and personal drivers correlate with their business and personal drivers? Point them out, bring them up, and connect at a deeper level asap.
3. Define buyer personas that include soft traits and speak to them.
4. Work with the Sales team to gain intel on decision makers, entity personality, and motivators to buy.
5. Get personal with subject lines, greetings, closing signatures – very basic, but it is too easy to bypass this very important step.
6. Watch how the prospect company Markets their product/service. Is their language casual or formal? Funny or serious? Brief or verbose? All are clues to show you how to relate to them on a deeper level sooner.
7. Run campaigns directly from a specific person to a specific person. Then test the absorption of the personalization. Try various roles to find to whom the decision makers are listening.
8. Allow Marketing to personally introduce a specific Sales lead to segue into a closing process. Stay aware of the relationships – and optimize to get the close. Marketing and Sales should never run exclusive to one another.

To be successful, Trust Factor Marketing needs detailed research and thought requiring a lot of perception as well as fact.

The result of a deeper “top of funnel” gets you to a closing position more quickly and with much higher quality. Faster close with higher quality = faster, higher revenue.

Sheri Tate is Director of Marketing at Amick Brown.

“ Every day is a chance to improve the Marketing process, but only if it is filled with common sense, analytics,  and provides positive goal attainment for all in my sphere. “

@IAmSheriTate – Twitter

Sheri Tate – LinkedIn

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Sr Director SAP Big Data Product Marketing, Technology & Innovation Platform

Big Data offers analysts and data scientists the opportunity to build more sophisticated and more accurate predictive models than before, but without the right data environment, it’s not easy. It requires an in-memory architecture that supports thousands of columns and billions of rows and a predictive analytics tool that can harness that architecture, such as SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics.

Twentieth-century technology is insufficient. Blame it on the disk. Back in the 1980s, database engineers saw a world where memory was extremely expensive. Just one terabyte of RAM cost over $100 million US dollars. Today, we can get it for less than $5,000 US dollars. So, vendors built database architectures centered on the disk.

In a Big Data world, the disk is simply too slow. Consider this: reading 1 petabyte of data off a disk sequentially – i.e. no seeking, just end-to-end straight off the disk – takes 58 days using the fastest hard disk available today (according to the Tom’s Hardware website). SSD definitely speeds things up: two days with the fastest SSD RAID. It’ll cost millions to buy, though.

In many ways, Big Data is a real-time data access problem. That’s precisely why innovators are developing new ways to store and process data, all in an effort to get around the hard disk bottleneck. All of the approaches, in essence, minimize the bottleneck in order to improve response time.

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing spreads a lot of data across many disks that can all be read simultaneously. Hadoop builds on the concept of distributed computing, but opens up the platform to handle any data set with any arbitrarily designed algorithm. To overcome the disk, the Hadoop community built Apache Spark, which provides a distributed data processing architecture, like Hadoop HDFS, that operates in-memory across commodity hardware.

Columnar Databases

Like distributed databases and Hadoop, columnar databases optimize data storage architecture in order to reduce the amount of data read off any one disk. It does this by grouping related attributes, or columns, together. The assumption is that most analytical queries only use a subset of columns, so you should only access data related to those specific columns. They also highly compress the data, further reducing the number of bits read off disk.

In-Memory Databases

In-memory databases take it to a whole new level by removing the disk from the equation altogether. It leverages the power of today’s processors to read and analyze data at a raw speed that’s 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than reading data off the disk. In some cases, customers have experienced performance gains of 100,000 times faster. How?

–   Compress the data with in-memory columnar data stores

–   Move the data accessed most often into L1 caches on the chip

That’s why we are so bullish about in-memory and the SAP HANA platform for Big Data. That’s not to say disk solutions don’t have a role to play. But…at the core you want an in-memory system that can run algorithms where your data is. No moving the data to the algorithms, that doesn’t work in a Big Data world. Instead, move the core algorithms into the data system.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics is the right tool for business analysts and data scientists to build predictive models from Big Data. First and foremost, it can analyze data inside SAP HANA and Apache Spark. There’s no need to transfer data out of these environments for processing. Rather, the SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics processing engine can run inside these tools –  dramatically improving performance.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics is also able to analyze exceptionally wide datasets. In fact, you can have up 15,000 columns in a dataset, while other tools support only a few hundred to 1,000 columns at most. This ensures that your predictive models provide the greatest level of accuracy possible.

Big Data is radically altering our world. It’s a game changer. For those who grab hold of it, you have an opportunity to propel your business forward – and the surest way forward is with SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics running on SAP HANA or Apache Spark. It is the best combination for building predictive models on Big Data, whether you’re a business analyst or data scientist.

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In our previous Blog , Get a Reporting and Analytics Planning Edge with Allevo  , we gave a short overview of our powerful product that give significant value when working with SAP and Excel for planning.

As you know, effective cost planning in SAP can present some challenges.

For one, standard SAP does not support driver-based costing, nor does the system provide an easy way to include non-SAP data (production or sales plan forecasts, for instance) into planning. Do you have side calculations – things like travel, consulting expenses, training costs, etc. – that you would like to include in your planning? Good luck with that.

Unless you’re using Allevo that is.  Our solution tackles all of these challenges – and much more – with ease.

Better yet, with Allevo you work in your familiar, easy-to-use Excel environment, using your own templates, but are fully integrated with SAP.

So, if you’re tired of not having real-time access to your vital planning data, frustrated by cumbersome workarounds, and annoyed with working in a system that doesn’t support the way you want to work,  give us a call.  You’ll be glad you did.

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In my previous Predictive blog, I introduced four main considerations that organizations need to keep in mind when they’re beginning that journey. Today, I’ll cover them in more detail.

1. How Do We Measure Business Value and Return on Investment?

An advanced analytics solution must make a measureable impact. If not, the solution doesn’t get noticed, never mind appreciated. This holds even more true, if the return on investment (ROI) can’t be realized as a significant opportunity to drive business growth or new market opportunities.

Take the example of a marketing campaign. The ROI is in having the intelligence to target the customers who are likely (if persuaded) to buy your product rather than finding customers who would have bought the product without any marketing required.

An advanced analytics solution will be short-lived if it creates a “wow” effect, but nothing else.  The solution must generate recurrent value, revenue, and business opportunities.

2. How Do We Use Advanced Analytics Effectively?

For your business, good questions to ask at the start of the journey are:

• Is the enterprise truly digital?
• Is there a single source of truth of all the data that is generated/captured by various functions of the enterprise?

These questions are important considerations. Why? Because businesses often approach advanced analytics in an ineffective manner.

Remember, advanced analytics drive value to every business function, be it marketing, finance, human resources, and so on. However, enterprise functions want often to embed advanced analytics into their business workflow and embark on advanced analytics initiatives in silos. Though there is value in doing so, the results can be underwhelming.

This is because they’re using adoptions of various technologies, methodologies, practices to address the use cases that might exists— but without an enterprise-wide vision for advanced analytics. Therefore, walls rather than bridges are built between the various functions.

The problem becomes self-perpetuating. With increasing adoption of advanced analytics solutions in various business units, the business as a whole finds it difficult to consolidate all the activities into a central initiative and have proper discipline and governance.

The solution is to create the vision and execute it across all functions— even if the pilot starts from one or two activities. The functions must agree that advanced analytics is an enterprise-wide mission. Leadership must demonstrate belief in an analytics-driven business that it is going to provide competitive advantage. In this way, advanced analytics becomes a true company asset.

3. Is Advanced Analytics Just Another Technology Project?

Advanced Analytics is not just another technology project. If considered to be a technology project, the business understands only the technical feasibility and not its business impact.

As mentioned, an advanced analytics initiative is the means by which a business gains a competitive advantage. It follows that outcomes provide the data to help make well-informed decisions.

A lesser or confined approach is a step in the wrong direction. There is no ROI associated with technology-only thinking, because no tangible results are expected as an outcome. An initiative to embrace advanced analytics must be inseparable from your business strategy.

4. Is Big Data Equal to High Quality Insight?

Big Data is not equal to high quality insight.  A traditional business approach is to think, “We’ve captured huge amounts of data, but how do we  make sense of it?” This is a wrong start.

The right approach is to start with a business question in mind. That way, you can ask if the data that you have is sufficient enough to provide the answer.

These are several pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together for one to find meaningful, actionable insights from the data. This is, after all,  the quest that we embarked on.

As we now know, advanced analytics is about business change, insight and value.

“The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data”-Sunset salvo. The American Statistician 40 (1).

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Lack of user-acceptance is considered a failure of any new Information System — a rule that equally applies to a Business Intelligence initiative. And the astounding fact is that this is a very common occurrence. The reasons can be varied, such as the quality of data, the usefulness of the analytics provided by the system, or merely the user-interface being unfriendly.

However, what is not considered in assessing the success or failure of the system is the number of users who did not get access the system — an error of omission (pun intended). Typical IT projects finalize the initial set of end-users right at the inception of the project, and no later than the requirements phase. To manage the scope of the project, it is typical to keep a small and manageable initial user-base. However, I believe that this is a mistake!

I believe it is a mistake, that in trying to ensure the success of the project, the scope of the BI deployment should be restricted to a few. The true value of a BI enterprise is the crowd-sourced intelligence that you derive from it — and by this assertion: the more the merrier! Not only will a wider audience give us a better assessment of the success of our BI initiative, it will also ensure wider and quicker post-deployment enhancements.

Starting with a large audience of users has many challenges, least of which is managing the scope of the BI project. Given that a data warehouse typically contains sensitive data, one of the main concerns of a large user-base is data security — ensuring that only the right users get access to the right data. This concern leads to the usual decision of limiting the initial user-base to just the power-users, ones that require none or minimal data security.

We see your challenge and raise you AccessOne©!

AccessOne is an information security software specifically designed for SAP Business Warehouse (SAP-BW). AccessOne allows you to build your access-control security in an easy excel-like matrix, and deploy it with a few clicks.  AccessOne can extract access information from your ECC system (be it role-based, structural authorizations, etc) or a traditional SoD ACL matrix, or even an excel file you created on your desktop. 

So that you can visualize AccessOne more completely–

A BI solution’s data security implementation is quite different from an OLTP system, even though they both try to achieve the same goal by means of a same set of parameters. The OLAP authorization mechanism works in the reverse direction of the procedures employed by an OLTP system.

See schematic below:

Take an example of an OLTP HR system / employee database. Here’s the sequence of events that occur when a user interacts with the system:

Now consider its BI counterpart. The typical user request sequence goes something like this:

Although, this is a simplified view, it’s easy to visualize the change in the mechanics of how authorization works between an OLTP and an OLAP system.

The power of AccessOne is in its ability to transform security parameters from the data structures that are designed for an OLTP system to the ones that are more suitable for an OLAP system. Moreover, AccessOne applies these authorization checks to any and all users of the SAP BI system. It will replicate your OLTP (ECC) system access parameters (role-based, structural, etc) into OLAP (SAP BW) system access parameters (analysis authorization). 

With this power, and with the guarantee that your BI system access is exactly the same as your ECC, you can now open up your BI system to all the ECC system users, be it power users, domain-specific users, supervisors, or individual-contributors.

Another power of AccessOne is “overriding” or “overloading” authorizations derived from OLTP. With a single access-control entry, you can override or overload (add to) the access of any user or user-group. For instance, if you have an end-user with limited access in the Finance ECC system, however you want to provide this user with extended access to the BW system on the finance cubes, this can be achieved by inserting a single access-control entry in the BI system.

In the following blog posts, we will examine some complicated yet typical case-studies to illustrate the power of AccessOne.

– Watch this Space –

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Like so many of my peers, and by that I mean those that started their careers years ago with the plan to remain at the same company until retirement, the news that outsourcing will end your career there is shocking to say the least.  When you must leave your company for whatever reason, and you aren’t really ready or old enough for retirement, it is quite distressing.  You look at the many millennials who seem to so comfortably pick up and move to a new company when they see a new opportunity and you think, “what do I know and what skills do I have that would enable me to start again somewhere?”

What felt like the worst thing that could happen to my career…….WASN’T.

I spent more than 25 years working at a company that was so large that there was an endless amount of potential in terms of jobs, career paths and the ability to climb the corporate ladder.  I loved my job as it was constantly changing and enabling me to grow.  I loved the people I worked with and through the years they became a kind of extended family.  This was my world – I never looked beyond it.

As I started to think about the situation at hand, some truths were evident. Through the years, I was afforded some very valuable training and experience.  I managed a team that was responsible for building and supporting 24 x 7 applications for a user base that numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  We learned, sometimes the hard way, that the right people, constant communication, process, documentation, and a strong focus on quality assurance and system performance are required for success.  When you are there not only to implement systems, but to support them, you learn to be very thoughtful about design, testing and user communication and training.  These are sometimes areas that are of little interest to those who implement and move on.  We had a roadmap and a long term view of the solutions we were building and we had a lot of experience that would ensure our success in getting there – but that was over.

Make a Plan, Work the Plan, Be Accountable

Together with some of my colleagues, we decided to start a small consulting business.  We realized that the skills and experience that we had acquired building and supporting SAP and BI solutions for such a large implementation would be of value somewhere.  We believed we could make this work….but at the same time we definitely had moments of concern.  We met and planned in our dining rooms.  We understood from our long-term and collective experience the value of developing a detailed project plan, holding people accountable, and then working the plan.

As Amick Brown became a reality, we knew we had the expertise in SAP and Business Intelligence, but what about running a business?  We had a lot to learn, but it turns out that there is a lot of help out there.

First, we found a mentor. This person had already done what we were trying to do.  Her business was in another state with a different focus so competition was not an issue.  She was a huge asset and we will be forever grateful.  We asked her endless questions, took copious notes and still reach out to her from time to time for advice.

We then took advantage of all of the resources we could identify.  The Small Business Administration provides immeasurable support to small businesses. Through the SBA, we connected with the Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) in the three counties in our area.  The centers are there to provide training, counseling and support to small businesses.  We attended all of the training that we could about starting a business, marketing, payroll, legal issues, accounting, etc.  We also discovered the Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) which is another valuable resource that has a focus on government contracting.  We attended many PTAC training sessions where we learned about doing business with the various government agencies and responding to Requests for Proposals.  Most of the training we attended was free and when there was a cost, it was minimal.

We worked with our bank to obtain an SBA backed loan to support our start-up costs.  I can’t stress enough the value of a good banking relationship.  I have to give a shout out to Wells Fargo for being such a good business partner and providing such terrific support through the years.

We pursued all of the certifications that were appropriate for us. We are a woman-owned business, we are a minority-owned business and we are a small business.  It is a lot of work to complete each application and it may be a bit overwhelming as you begin the process, but it is well worth the time.  Doors will be opened instead of closed because you are a supplier that holds a specific certification.

Conferences and business matchmaking events are one of the best places to learn and make connections.  We connected with people in other companies and government agencies, and identified additional useful resources to call upon when needed.  Each event helped us learn, grow and refine our marketing material and “elevator speech”.

Our first contracts were with companies we connected with through our already extensive network.  Though they were small contracts at first, it provided us the opportunity to build up our support systems that included HR and payroll services, legal support, accounting processes, web support and recruiting systems and processes.  Obviously, we grew very quickly beyond SAP Business Intelligence – a greater reach for our growing customer base.

So, was outsourcing a panic situation or a gift? Here are the lessons learned:

• Starting a business is completely possible. We found support everywhere we looked and people wanting to see us succeed.  We started with what we knew, and then looked for help and guidance for what we didn’t know.  Help is out there.
• Relationships are everything – We understand that without good relationships with our clients, our employees, our subcontractors and our other business partners we won’t thrive. We will always do right by each of them.  They can count on us.
• Continue to think long term – We make sure that we hire seasoned people who understand the long term impact of design, and in the event one of our hires needs additional assistance to ensure success we make sure it is provided. The long term success of our clients and the relationship we have with them is of utmost importance to us.
• Be frugal – We have always had an eye on cost containment and we don’t spend money on things that don’t bring value. We are fairly modest with business purchases and we would rather offer better compensation and benefits packages to our employees and contractors – this way everybody wins.
• Being a business owner is a completely rewarding and exciting experience. We have a renewed energy and enthusiasm toward all that we do.  We learn something new every day and life is good.

To date we have made the San Francisco Business Times Fast 100 list which lists the fastest growing privately held companies in the San Francisco Bay Area two years in a row and the Largest Women-Owned Business list three years in a row.  Our US focus is growing markets in the East and Central United States, as well as the West.  Our detailed plans, working them carefully, and staying accountable are making a new business success our reality.

Keep an eye on Amick Brown.  Good things are happening here!

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The Importance of Cultural Due Diligence

We have all been there. You are a few months in to a new job and something is just not perfect. The work itself is on target, challenging, fulfilling, and not too many surprises. Your colleagues are professional and friendly, but you are floundering around still to find your comfort zone. It is likely that cultural fit is imbalanced between you and your new company.

In the fairly recent past, corporate culture has evolved from the scenario of if you were in business the dark suit went on in the morning, arrived at your cubicle, and preserved the time-honored tradition of being a staunch professional. Now, companies take on all sorts of personalities, expectations, and cultures which range from the still staunch professionals in dark suits and cubicles to bean bags, mandatory relaxation breaks, and shorts/jeans/tshirts as office attire.

The bottom line is that they are all correct! How a company excels in business is driven by their beliefs and success stories. It has become a critical step to not only evaluate skill requirements, but also intimately understand the cultural aspect of a new business.

Organizational culture evolves over time based on attitudes, customs and values that make up a company’s unique social and psychological environment. An organization’s culture touches all aspects of the business and it is expressed in its products, the way it interacts with it employees, customers and the rest of the world. Certainly, it will impact the new employee directly. The subtleties of culture are definitely something that can be sought out and matched to candidates with due diligence.

What is a fit for one candidate may not be suitable for another. You can teach an employee new skills but is hard to train for cultural fit if they don’t fit the mold. When there is a cultural fit, the person will naturally perform consistent with how things are done in an organization. It results in employees being engaged and focused on growth and the organization reaps the benefits. As well, the employee reaps the benefit of loving their job, not only for the skill and professional challenge, but because it is where they thrive psychologically. The opposite is true when there is a cultural mismatch. Studies show that cultural fit positively impacts performance, ability to adopt to changes and retention.

The same principles apply to staff augmentation decisions. It is exceptionally successful to take the culture fit analysis step when hiring contractors. At Amick Brown, we have built our successes on the practice of not only understanding our clients’ cultures, but staying involved after the placement with both the company and the contractor. Ongoing team building puts everyone in a position of positive communication and therefore reduces churn.

Amick Brown’s IT sourcing strategy in recruiting and staffing projects is to ensure that, apart from technical skills, there is a cultural fit both for the customer and the consultant. Our proprietary methodology incorporates thoroughly understanding the client’s cultural personality. We take into consideration the leadership and the communication style of the client’s team. At times the role that we are staffing might need a heavier emphasis on technical skills vs cultural fit. We are realistic about both the positive and negative aspects of the culture and balance our recruiting strategy for each client. We are aware of the need to strike a balance between technical and cultural fit in IT recruiting. We are proud to say that this has helped us to achieve more than 95% consultant retention with our clients. Cultural due diligence in hiring and staff augmentation makes a big difference!

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