Implementing an analytics solution can be a game changer for your organization. It allows you to turn your data into information that employees in all areas can take advantage of.
However, despite all the promise of analytics, in practicality, implementation is often met with mixed results (a lot of failures) and a loss of momentum. How can you get your team motivated to get the results you’re looking for? Let’s examine. (more…)
In a previous blog post, we talked about the Top 10 issues in IT, the list put out each year by EDUCAUSE at its annual conference. Another interesting panel discussion took place at the conference, tying together many of the issues on the list.
Tweet: Recommendations on how to measure student success in universities
The EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research teamed up with the Association for Institutional Research and NASPA-Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education to study how colleges and universities use data and analytics to help students succeed. “Student success” itself was ranked number two on the EDUCAUSE Top 10 list, but much of what was written about in the study and talked about on the panel also addresses almost every other issue on the list. (more…)
Lately, I have been thinking about the transition to value-based care in terms of a journey and envisioning an automobile dashboard as a means for presenting the most relevant information from perspectives that change throughout the trip. For example, a vehicle dashboard equipped with GPS can give “turn-by-turn” navigation while also measuring overall progress toward the destination. It can also provide the driver with visibility into different collections of helpful measures at a glance, and assist the driver in optimizing the trip plan based on priorities such as taking a scenic route versus the fastest one.
Similarly, analytics – done well – can give healthcare organizations visibility into their incremental (“turn-by-turn”) steps toward value-based care, exposing opportunities for course corrections while also showing how each step fits into the broader context of the entire journey. Here’s how. (more…)
Distribution is an intensely competitive business and inventory is key to determining profitability. Applying advanced analytics to inventory management is a savvy way for distributors to track their performance and gain insights that can fuel profitability and growth.
Tweet: Inventory analytics: Two sets of metrics that really matter
There now are more than 30 metrics distributors can use to gauge their performance. I like to group inventory metrics into three sets: those concerned with inventory only, those that focus on the interplay of inventory and people, and those that track inventory with sales. Let’s take a closer look at the first two categories and how they can improve distributors’ performance. (more…)
What is the state of trust in data within healthcare organizations? And how much data is easily accessible to decision-makers? Dimensional Insight recently set out to answer these and other questions by surveying healthcare chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders.
Tweet: Survey says: Healthcare CIOs don’t fully trust their data
The survey probed three realms within healthcare organizations: clinical, financial, and operational. Overall, it found few organizations have very strong trust in their data while levels of self-service vary across the enterprise. The survey also revealed that most healthcare organizations plan to invest money toward improving both data trust and self-service. Here is a closer look at the results. (more…)
The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is one of the country’s largest gatherings in higher education IT, drawing more than 8,000 people from 46 different countries. The conference addresses the future of IT, and as always, one of the highlights is the announcement of EDUCAUSE’s Top 10 list of issues in IT.
Tweet: Data is at the heart of the 2019 EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT issues
The 2019 list features many of the same issues as were featured in 2018, albeit prioritized differently. More than half of the list relates to data, a reflection of the data initiatives many higher education institutions are working to implement. (more…)
It’s one thing to implement technology in an organization and to see positive results from that. But the impact of those results can be multiplied when you can connect the technology implementation to a greater mission.
This sentiment was front and center at the CHIME Fall CIO Forum, held Oct. 30 – Nov. 2 in San Diego, California. The various sessions and keynotes emphasized how an inspiring goal and a smart approach to technology can yield powerful results. (more…)
There are some quirks of timing that we can’t control. We hear stories of serendipity in which a chance occurrence leads to love, success, eternal happiness! Or stories where the difference of one second is a matter of life or death. Timing seems so uncontrollable. But what if it’s not? What if there are some aspects of timing we can control? And what if this could help us do better in our jobs?
Author Daniel Pink takes on timing in his book, “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.” Pink argues there is an optimal time to do certain types of work… and non-optimal times when you should avoid other types of work. Interestingly, when it comes to analytics, there are certain periods of the day that are better than others to gain insights. Let’s take a look. (more…)
It sounds like an idea any university’s leadership can get behind: Using data to make a positive difference in the lives of students. But it can also be overwhelming. What’s the right kind of data to collect? How can it be used to make improve a student’s experience? The problem seems complex. The solution doesn’t have to be.
Tweet: Identifying data that can make a difference for students
Many universities are finding success in analytics by keeping things simple and building from there. Here are some lessons learned from their successes, and how you can go about using data to make a difference for students at your university as well. (more…)
Tasting rooms are the first handshake that many prospective consumers have with a brand. Wineries look to tasting rooms as an opportunity towards a more hospitable approach at making their next sale. For many, tasting rooms prove to be successful. With an inviting atmosphere, engaging ambassadors, and a great product portfolio, it is easy to get right.
Tweet: How analytics can help wineries improve the tasting room experience
However, many brands still struggle with fine-tuning their approach. Does this mean that prospecting clients is a game they’ve already lost? Here’s how wineries are using analytics to help them with their efforts. (more…)
Trust is the foundation of all good relationships—and not just between people. Trust in data is essential for healthcare organizations. This is especially true as the move toward value-based care demands increased, high-level collaboration among different constituencies within a healthcare enterprise.
Tweet: How to build a data foundation that supports value-based care
As care migrates away from straight fee-for-service, healthcare organizations must weigh investments, risks, and tradeoffs objectively with quantitative, trustworthy data. This kind of data driven decision-making will be critical to shaping the initiatives and high stakes choices required by value-based care. In this blog, I will detail three steps you can take to build a trusted data foundation. (more…)
Value-based care is quickly moving from “talked about” to “reality” in healthcare. As providers are implementing new value-based arrangements, there are a lot of issues that are coming to light that may not have been fully thought out or realized before.
Stakeholders from across the healthcare ecosystem discussed several of these realities recently at Xtelligent Media’s Value-Based Care Summit, held in Boston. While I have a notebook filled with takeaways from the event, here are a few themes that stood out on what providers need to be cognizant of as we move to a more value-based world. (more…)
If there’s one thing that continually impresses me about nurses, it’s their ability to see through the noise and just get the job done. Like the nurse present for the labor of my third child who saw that—quite suddenly—the baby was there but the doctor was not. Just like that, no fuss, she prepared to deliver the baby herself. (Side note: the doctor came just in time, but I knew it was the nurse who had my back.)
Beth Grimes of Gwinnett Medical Center (GMC) is one of those nurses with the uncanny ability to cut through all the clutter to get to the optimal end result. Beth is director of enterprise analytics at GMC, but she has a long career as a registered nurse. It’s clear that her clinical experience has translated into analytics, and she is a great guide for her team on how to ask the right questions and get the information they need to make decisions without overly concerning themselves with minutiae. I recently visited Beth and several members of her team at GMC in metro Atlanta. Here are some highlights from my visit. (more…)
Many universities around the world find themselves dealing not just with student data related to admissions and finances, but also data from education quality surveys containing students’ opinions on a large number of dimensions. This information alone could fill its own database, but many schools are figuring out ways to incorporate all this data that’s being tracked across the university.
Tweet: How Ghent University solves budget and education policy issues with BI
This is the case for Ghent University, one of the major universities in Belgium. The 200-year-old university has built for itself a strong student-centric reputation, and it offers students educational programs in a number of fields. The university has more than 41,000 students and 9,000 staff members across its more than 100 departments. Ghent needed a flexible technology solution to work with its data that combines ‘hard’ student, course, and financing information with ‘soft’ program and course evaluation information. Here’s how Ghent addressed its educational and administrative needs with business intelligence. (more…)
Any business understands the power of data. Hard numbers lay the groundwork for the organization, holding up and supporting every wall and beam. Just as with an actual building, it’s important to put thought into the foundation. If you don’t properly consider this “design” phase, how do you know how your foundation will hold up?
Tweet: Inventory analytics: Laying the foundation of your business
One critical data piece for a business to track from the start is its inventory. What’s moving? What isn’t? How long are products in inventory for? It’s important to understand these pieces of information in order to control costs and capture revenue. Here’s how organizations can use inventory analytics as a tool to meet and design their end goals. (more…)
Interoperability. We’ve been talking about it in healthcare for more than a decade, but as for progress? Well… while there have been advances in some areas, it’s clear we have a long way to go.
Tweet: Why interoperability is paramount in the new healthcare landscape
Today, the need for interoperability is even greater than it was before. It’s becoming increasingly clear that as new payment models emerge and healthcare shifts towards a population-oriented view, free and timely exchange of data will be critical. Let’s take a look. (more…)
The ground is shifting beneath the feet of healthcare leaders. The United States is inexorably moving toward value-based care, requiring healthcare organizations to start laying the foundation for more holistic, proactive, and population-oriented care. But today’s margins depend on the “piece work” model of fee-for-service, treating people primarily when they are already sick.
How can healthcare organizations address both simultaneously? Well, the good news is that they are not mutually exclusive. Here are three suggestions for success. (more…)
Here at Dimensional Insight, our goal is for organizations to make informed decisions that are influenced by a concrete foundation of data. For the past 30 years, we have seen companies thrive by feeling confident in the choices that they make, using numbers that they understand.
Part of our strategy includes partnering with companies that can offer Diver Platform to their customer base. Over the last few years, we have been focusing more in this area. I recently sat down with Corinne Federici, vice president of channel development, to discuss our partner program, the future of BI, and what Corinne is up to outside of the office. (more…)
Universities, by definition, are made up of several professional schools. While the more professional schools would indicate, to many, the more prestigious the university, the more professional schools within a university could present more complications at an IT level.
Tweet: 3 things you need to know for university-wide technology implementations
Just like any business, colleges and universities use data to improve performance – but they can face challenges unique to their field. Depending on how its technology is set up and the layout of its buildings, a university might have to spread a technology implementation across several schools – and, in many cases, across several locations. Here are three keys to keep in mind if your university is undergoing a large technology implementation. (more…)
National Health IT Week is a nationwide awareness week sponsored by HIMSS and the Institute for e-Policy. It is “focused on catalyzing actionable change within the U.S. health system through the application of information and technology.”
Tweet: National Health IT Week: How analytics contributes to healthier communities
The five-day celebration from Oct. 8-12 acknowledges the successful and lasting effects that technology has had on the U.S. healthcare system, as well as continuing the promise to seek out innovative solutions. Let’s examine the role that analytics plays in National Health IT Week. (more…)
The beverage alcohol industry has several large distributors that represent the majority of wineries in the United States. With such muscle power at the top of the pyramid, how can smaller distributors survive?
Tweet: How small distributors can thrive in a competitive market
In a competitive market, it often seems there are no advantages to being a smaller and less-known organization. However, the size of your organization will not break your success; a small mindset will. Instead of being intimidated by larger distributors, celebrate what makes your organization different. What can your smaller organization accomplish that a larger distributor can’t? (more…)
When you come across something challenging, how do you react? Let’s take math as an example. Many people believe their struggles in math are due to “not having a math brain.” Others, however, keep plugging away until they figure it out and logarithms are a piece of cake.
The former types of people have “fixed” mindsets, while the latter types have “growth” mindsets. And it’s this growth mindset that can help you reap benefits in many areas in life – including analytics. Let’s take a look. (more…)
It’s the $3.3 trillion question: how can we create a U.S. healthcare system that offers quality, patient care that is economically responsible? This is a question that people in the healthcare system have been asking for years.
Tweet: Dimensional Insight Book Club: Reverse Innovation in Healthcare
Researchers Vijay Govindarajan and Ravi Ramamurti think they have a solution, and it lies overseas. For the past six weeks, the Dimensional Insight Book Club has been reading Reverse Innovation in Healthcare: How to Make Value-Based Delivery Work, exploring Indian healthcare practices and how their principles could be adopted by the United States. Let’s hear what our panel has to say. (more…)
I recently attended the second annual WSWA Women’s Leadership Council (WLC) in Washington, DC. This event brought together 56 senior women executives who work in all areas of the beverage alcohol industry, including legal, IT, operations, and more. This was the second year that Dimensional Insight participated as a sponsor.
Tweet: Highlights from the 2018 WSWA Women’s Leadership Council
The WLC was formed to empower women to advance in the beverage alcohol industry. And this event did not disappoint. I walked away feeling invigorated and optimistic about what the future holds for female wine and spirits executives. Here are some highlights from the event. (more…)
Workbench® Visual Integrator™ (VI) has rich support for different types of file encoding. When you have input from multiple sources, you’ll want to make sure that the file encoding matches each of your input files. Just look at a VI script Filein input object, and you can see that it supports these encodings: auto, ascii, gb 18030, latin1, utf-8, unicode, unicode-be, and unicode-le. Likewise, Builder™ and Spectre™ support these encodings, too.
Twitter: What You Need to Know about Encoding
Admittedly, this topic is pretty geeky, but does it pique your interest to plunge into the esoteric history of digital file encoding? What are each of these options? And, which do you choose? To answer these questions, to understand why different types of encoding are used, and to confidently make the right choices for your data, let’s start at the beginning. (more…)
For years, bigger was considered better when it came to hospitals. But now some hospitals are thinking small. In an effort to deliver faster, more convenient care, some healthcare systems are opening what are called “microhospitals” or “neighborhood hospitals.” These put care closer to the patient while allowing established hospitals to expand their footprints.
Tweet: Microhospitals: how a new healthcare model leverages business intelligence
Tandem Hospital Partners, founded in 2014, operates several new microhospitals, with plans to open a total of 15 in 2018. Tandem’s innovative business model relies heavily on data and business intelligence to help the company deliver timely, quality care. Here is a look at how Tandem is leveraging data and BI. (more…)
If “America runs on Dunkin’,” then parts of Ireland certainly run on Corrib Oil. Corrib not only fuels people with coffee and bakery items, it sells fuel for homes, cars, and trucks in the west of Ireland and the midlands.
Tweet: How new database technology fuels oil company’s analytics
Corrib’s business has two sides– oil distribution and 18 retail locations selling gas, coffee, fresh foods, and grocery items. But each side of the business has many components and each component can have several data technologies in place. How does a company like that get its arms around all its data to assess the state of its business? Here is how Corrib wrangled its data – and then instituted one change to make that data enormously more useful. (more…)
When it comes to incorporating technology into the wine industry, organizations have so many opportunities to apply analytics and technology. However, there is a huge discrepancy in terms of dollars invested towards IT.
A recent WBM Technology Survey by Wine Business Monthly magazine analyzes the top IT priorities for wineries based on various categories such as winery size, job function, and IT job function. Most wineries have the same top IT issue, which is “providing better data to our trade sales team.” Better data can result in gained insights into areas of the business and opportunities to spur company growth. Let’s examine how wineries can better understand their top priorities and implement the technology to support them. (more…)
According to the National Council on Aging (NCOA), every 11 seconds, an older adult is being treated in the emergency room for fall-related injuries. This makes falls the leading cause of non-fatal and fatal trauma for older Americans. The number of falls is expected to increase by 2020, making it a multi-billion dollar problem. A majority of patients will sustain injuries that lead to larger and critical health complications.
National Falls Prevention Awareness Day, sponsored by the NCOA, takes place on the first day of fall (September 22nd). It aims to raise awareness and educate communities on how they can assess and combat the increasing statistic. Here we are going to take a look at who is at risk for falls and different ways to prevent them – including using analytics. (more…)
I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about the importance of curiosity lately, and well… that all made me curious as to how curiosity relates to our business lives, and in particular, to analytics and decision-making.
The September/October issue of Harvard Business Review featured an article titled, “The Business Case for Curiosity.” Based on the research findings presented in this article and in other sources, it’s clear that a curious mind can improve decision-making and business results. Let’s take a look. (more…)
